In an email a few weeks ago, my former assistant (and alarmingly successful writer/director) Rawson Thurber apologized for ending a sentence with a preposition. I insisted that he was well within his rights to dangle a preposition, split an infinitive, or break pretty much any rule he’d been taught about English — especially the seemingly-arbitrary ones.
Grammarians come in two flavors. A descriptivist studies the way people use a language, while a prescriptivist tries to lay down the rules of a language.
Prescriptivists are assholes. Ignore them.
Or better yet, try to make them explain why you’re not supposed to dangle a preposition. After all, there’s not a Bible of the English language, in which a certified deity listed his or her commandments. Backed into a corner, the prescriptivist will probably say, “because English comes from Latin, and that’s not allowed in Latin.”
Well, I studied Latin. It’s cool in a geeky way, sort of like computer programming. Many English words come from Latin, so it can be fascinating to play linguistic C.S.I. to figure out how “abscission” came from “away” and “to cut.” But here’s the most interesting and challenging thing about Latin:
It’s nothing like English.
Most notably, it has cases and declensions, which have pretty much disappeared in our happy language, replaced by word order and, you guessed it, prepositions.
But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s another article that does a good job explaining why the grammar Nazis are wrong.
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