Prepositions Are Now OK To End Sentences With

By Eli Amdur

A Tale of Broken, Changed, or Discarded Rules

Earlier this year, Merriam-Webster issued an edict – on Instagram, of all literary ironies – that it’s now OK to end a sentence with a preposition. I don’t know if your earth shattered, but mine did.

Until, that is, I read (and reread) Columbia University Associate Professor of Linguistics John McWhorter’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times: Against the Sentence-Ending Preposition Rule (3/9/24).

Essentially, if this is OK with Professor McWhorter, it’s OK with me, although not without a little resistance on my part. Old habits die hard, you know.

Rules are rules – until they’re not.

Schooled in the 1950s and 1960s in what I’m confident would be considered by scholars a robust and rigorous public school education, followed by a beautiful liberal arts and humanities degree, and all that on top of my upbringing by two self-educated parents who wrote beautifully – my father in three languages, no less – I was at ease with the strict regulations regarding prepositions. Doesn’t For Whom The Bell Tolls sound so much better than Who The Bell Tolls For? End of discussion. Maybe.

Truth be known, I was a stickler for that in the two leadership and communication graduate courses I taught for 15 years at Fairleigh Dickinson University. I ran out of a lot of red ink correcting papers, with sentence-ending prepositions alone. Not to mention split infinitives, singular-plural agreement, spelling out single-digit numbers, and a mix of caps and no caps in headlines and titles.

Regarding our prepositions – those humble connectors of space, time, nouns and pronouns, and the importance of which cannot be overstated but is commonly taken for granted – there is a delicious story, not necessarily verifiable, involving Winston Churchill. It’s not that this didn’t happen, it’s just that every credible source has variations of it.

In any event, it seems “Old Winnie,” as King George VI liked to refer to his prime minister, got into quite a tiff with one of his editors or speech writers or proofreaders (See what I mean about verifiable?) who insisted on prohibiting prepositions ending sentences, and kept sending Churchill’s drafts back to him with comments that further elevated Churchill’s temperature. When Churchill, who knew English grammar as well as anyone who ever spoke the language but who also took great pride in his individual style, had had enough, he took the draft, scribbled “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put,” and returned it once and for all. (Note: it’s also conceivable that Churchill used a more colorful word than nonsense, but that shall forever remain in the shadows of history.)

English: The Most Spoken Language On Earth

More people speak English – as a first, second, or third language – than any other. By far. When you count mother tongue, principal language, or official second language of no less than 56 countries, the impossible to arrive at figure is a guess of about three trillion. Maybe more.

How did a language that nearly went extinct just a millennium ago become so dominant? How did a geographically limited language (Northumbria, England) spoken by as few as an estimated 30,000 people spread so far? How did a language that survived the invasions of the bigger, stronger Norse in the ninth and tenth centuries, and Normans in the eleventh, come to dominate all others?

English: Porous, Flexible, Creative, Forgiving

English is – and always was – open to including words from other languages. As a result, English is really good at making them fit in – or making the language fit around them. English is highly creative, creating more new words and idiomatic expressions each year than all others combined. And English allows, much more liberally, common usage becoming accepted as formal rules.

So, thanks, Merriam-Webster. We’ve got lots to thank you…for.