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> but there are times when "ungrammatical" constructions
> may be very clear as well--even superior to a strictly
> grammatical construction. For any who doubt this, there
> is the classic story of Churchill who, upon being
> admonished about ending a sentence with a preposition,
> is said to have retorted "Madam, there are some things
> up with which I will not put!"
There are a couple of things wrong with the Churchill story--
I mean besides the fact that it didn't happen that way.
First, the extreme inversion is unnecessary. The sentence
could have ended "things with which I will not put up" and
still not have ended with a preposition (because "up" is
an adverb or, as some hippy-dippy grammarians might have it,
a part of a phrasal verb).
Second, there isn't really a rule against ending a sentence
with a preposition. It's just a bugaboo. No respectable
style guide forbids ending a sentence with a preposition,
though some guides may warn that your less enlightened readers
may think it's a mistake.
I think that most of the time, when the issue of gaining
clarity by sacrificing grammatical rules comes up, either
the rule isn't a real rule or there is a grammatical solution
(not necessarily the first one that springs to mind) at least
as good as the ungrammatical one.
In decades of technical writing, I can recall only one
grammatical error that's been necessary for the sake of
clarity, and that's the plural attributive noun (as in
"parts list").
Mark L. Levinson
Herzliya, Israel
nosnivel -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il
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