Churchill once chided one of his proof readers who rearranged a sentence to get rid of a trailing preposition: A sentence with 5 trailing prepositions. A father who read a story to his children almost every night was greeted with this:
"Up" is usually an adverb, not a preposition. To put up is an idiom in which "up" is indeed an adverb, indicating the direction in which you put something. Of course there are plenty of instances in which "up" is a true prepositions, as "Call the doctor. Little Johnny just stuck an entire carrot up his nose." All he had to do was move the "with": This is something with which I shall not put up. And you can be sure that Mr. Churchill formed the future tense correctly, using "shall" in the first person rather than "will." Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Again, "up" is an adverb in this sentence, not a preposition. You're bringing the book up rather than down or sideways or back or out. And the joke has been garbled in the many retellings: The idiom is "what for," not "why for," so the sentence has to begin with "what," not why. This has been expanded to eight (alleged) trailing prepositions: "What did you bring that book I didn't want to be read to out of about Down Under up for?" The interesting point about these exercises is that they prove that there is, indeed, no rule in English grammar against trailing prepositions. Simplify the sentence to its bare bones: "I was read to." If you wanted to move that preposition to the "correct" position, where would it go??? It has a reflexive object, "I," and we can't say "To I was read," or even "To me was read." This so-called rule is a leftover from the early days of literacy. The printing press increased the amount of reading material available by several orders of magnitude. This made it both practical and possible for the common folk to learn to read and write: In the old days they might go for weeks without seeing any writing, and in any case there were no textbooks to teach them to read, because they were too expensive to print for the common folk. The printing press made textbooks affordable, and before long public education began to spread, and today literacy has became nearly universal in the developed world. But in the early days, since most important documents were written in French or Latin, no one had bothered to study and organize English grammar. So when there was suddenly a need for English grammar textbooks, the scholars simply took Latin grammar books and translated them into English. In Latin, it is indeed incorrect to split a preposition from its object for practical reasons, so they carried that rule into English. This led to some amusing faux-paradigms, such as "declining" nouns in a language in which nouns are only inflected for singular and plural: Nominative case: the boy Genitive case: the boy's (I suppose we could say that we "decline" nouns for possessive in English, even though, if I'm not mistaken "boy's" is a contraction of "boy his") Dative case: to the boy (completely ignoring the fact that we can leave out the preposition and indicate the case by word order alone: I gave the boy the book) Accusative case: the boy And my personal favorite, the vocative case: O boy! Another laugh is the rule against splitting infinitives. In Latin, the infinitive is a single word: amare, to love; videre, to see; etc. It's physically impossible to split a Latin infinitive. In English it's quite possible and we do it all the time: I need you to carefully read this contract and correct any errors. Pedants want to change that to "to read carefully." Anyway, there's no rule in English against ending a sentence with a preposition, and indeed there are many instances in which it's preferable, even unavoidable.
