Of all that which I consider worthy, perhaps the most remarkable is when someone does exactly what they promise they’re going to do. I weep with gratitude at every demonstration of competence and fulfillment of obligation. That experience grows increasingly rare. With a mobile telephone in everyone’s hand, the expectation is that they will phone it in—and get it wrong.
I went on a dictionary buying kick shortly before beginning this month’s paper. The news was that Merriam-Webster had overcome its mental constipation and finally allowed that it is permissible to end a sentence with a preposition. It was a cause for outrage in some circles, particularly those which value tradition over grammar.
I have long known the injunction against ending with a preposition in English was a 17th century wrong turn. Fussbudgets like John Dryden (and later Edward Gibbon) wanted to make our disheveled and freewheeling tongue conform to the elegant rules of Latin—which it cannot. The error persisted for so long that it became mistaken for correctness. Your third grade teacher, Miss Fudge, beat the lie into you and made you accept it as holy—though she had ceased, a few years earlier, trying to make lefty students write with the other hand.
I’ve had fistfights (via email) over the preposition matter, which I’ve won by sending scans of H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. I hesitate to
