Re: Ending a sentence with a prep

[Joanna Sheldon <cjs10 -at- CORNELL -dot- EDU>]

Mike --

>Suspicious?  -- Suspicious??!!  Do you find that sentence hard to understand?

>>If a sentence works, if it reads well, if it is as elegant and well-balanced
>>as the sentence quoted, let it be as long as it bloody well wants to be!  We
>>Americans have had it pounded into us since we were knee high to a
>>grasshopper that the ideal sentence contains no more than a subject, an
>>object and a verb.  Does this hold true in England, as well, now? -- For
>>shame!

>Erm...no.

>Perhaps your lungs are much bigger than mine.  Although the sentence itself
is easy enough to understand, it would take a mammal much larger than myself
to be able to read it all without suffocating!

>I dunno - maybe I should give up smoking while I still have some breath
left inside me.



Okay, okay, sorry I blasted off.

Now, this IS writing we're talking about and not public speaking -- but say
we were going to SPEAK the Fowler sentence.  Who says you can only drag a
breath at a period, sorry, full stop?  This sort of paragraph-sentence needs
to be spoken unhurriedly, with pauses as though for deliberation, which
allow the thoughts to sink into the listeners.  Besides, the man lived in a
time when there WAS time simply to enjoy words, and the feeling of them
rolling off your tongue.

I've got the monster marked (below) with [] to indicate gasps for breath.
If you choke on the last phrase, you are allowed  to throw in a pause
between "correctness" and "derived" -- but if you need to, son, you're in
deep trouble.

>>"Those who lay
>>down the universal principle that final prepositions are 'inelegant' []
>>are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a
>>valuable idiomatic resource, [] which has been used freely by all our
>>greatest writers [] except those whose instinct for English idiom has
>>been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin
>>standards."

cheers,

Joanna