Among the many quotes attributed to Winston Churchill, one is his alleged response when criticized for using prepositions at the end of his sentences:

“That,” he supposedly said, “is the type of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

The quote is almost certainly apocryphal (that is, of doubtful authenticity). But nonetheless, it still shows the tortured syntax that results when trying to avoid this purported grammar gaffe.

Here at “Weird Words” over the past two weeks, we’ve been chipping away at such “nonsense” — namely, rules forbidding the use of ain’t (two weeks ago) and then most recently, the prejudice against splitting infinitives (e.g., “to boldly go”).

So this week continues my grammar crusade by dealing with the age-old stricture against using prepositions to end your sentence with.

Like I just did there.

A preposition is (usually) a short word like to, for or from — or in the case of Churchill’s quote, up and with. (There are several longer ones — such as through, without and beneath.) Often involving position, these words indicate the relationship of a noun or pronoun to the rest of the sentence. When I used to teach nuts-and-bolts grammar, we liked to say that this part of speech showed “anything a cat can do to a cloud” (beside, over, into, etc.) — though this hardly covers every single preposition.

According to Merriam-Webster, in the 17th and 18th centuries a pair of linguistic curmudgeons decided it was improper to use these “position” words at the end of a sentence. In all likelihood, this was an attempt to align English grammar with Latin — which was then much beloved in scholarly circles. As it happens, Latin is a language in which it’s impossible to use the so-called “terminal preposition.”

(As we saw last week, this was also behind the similarly spurious argument against split infinitives: Those can’t exist in Latin either — or in many other languages, for that matter.)

Now, in addition to various online resources, I happen to own at least seven references on writing & grammar — and not even one upholds this rule against the terminal preposition. In fact, the venerable Chicago Manual of Style — still a sort of Bible for professional writers — calls it “an ill-founded superstition.” (For the record, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that noun applied to any other writing issue!)

What the guides do point out is how awkward things can get when you try to uphold the rule:

Instead of a perfectly natural sentence like “That’s the puddle I stepped in,” you get, “That’s the puddle into which I stepped” — ugh. Or something equally icky: “Is she the person to whom you gave it?”

Unless they want to sound like someone in a Jane Austen book, people just don’t talk that way; and one simple-but-terrific rule I learned in college is: “Try not to write anything you wouldn’t want to say out loud.”

Indeed, the attempt to sidestep final prepositions has lately resulted in a student writing error that is all but impossible to fix — I mean, by explaining why it’s wrong.

Student writers now know that it sounds quite scholarly to avoid the terminal preposition by using one of those “in which” formulas: “This is the style in which I write.”

And so, to help sound more “eddicated,” they start using “in which” when all they really mean is “which”: “That’s the kind of pizza in which we like to eat.” For us teachers, such a sentence feels like getting poked in the ear with a very sharp pencil. (No. 2, of course.)

So the rule wreaks havoc — yet folks still complain when it gets flouted. On its long page addressing the issue, Merriam-Webster cites several angry letters-to-the-editor — including this somewhat whimsical missive from as recently as 2016:

“Why do both editorial and letter writers have to flagrantly split the infinitive? And lastly, ending a sentence with a preposition is something we can do without!”

On a final note, here is an additional headache that arises when trying to obey this “ill-founded superstition”: You often have to wrestle with who and whom — as in, for example, “Is that the teacher for whom you wrote this?” (Rather than the simpler, “Is that the teacher you wrote it for?”

SIGH. I guess we’ll have to tackle the “who/whom” headache next week.

If only that were an ill-founded superstition!