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We’ve written a newsletter article about it (Problems with Prepositions), and in Rule 1 of Prepositions we state, “One of the undying myths of English grammar is that you may not end a sentence with a preposition.” Yet, we still receive admonitions from well-meaning readers who think we've made an error when ending a sentence with a preposition. Where did this myth originate, and how did it become such a prevalent belief?
Thanks to loyal reader Yvonne V. for alerting us to an excellent article
that should put this myth to rest—for all who read it anyway.
Where the “No Ending a Sentence With a Preposition” Rule Comes From
It all goes back to 17th-century England and a fusspot named John Dryden.
by Dan Nosowitz
There are thousands of individual rules for proper grammatical use of any
given language; mostly, these are created, and then taught, in order to
maximize understanding and minimize confusion. But the English language
prohibition against “preposition stranding”—ending a
sentence with a preposition like with, at, or of—is not like this. It
is a fantastically stupid rule that when followed often has the effect of
mangling a sentence. And yet for hundreds of years, schoolchildren have
been taught to create disastrously awkward sentences like “With whom
did you go?”
The origins of this rule date back to one guy you may have heard of. Of
whom you may have heard. Whatever. His name was John Dryden.
Born in 1631, John Dryden was the most important figure throughout the
entire Restoration period of the late 17th century. He was more prolific,
more popular, more successful, and more ambitious than any of the other
writers of his era, and his era included John Milton. He was
England’s first official poet laureate. He wrote dozens of plays,
poems, works of satire, literary prose, and criticism. The best modern
edition of the collected works of John Dryden took the University of
California Press about 50 years to create, and runs to 20 gigantic volumes.
He perfected the heroic couplet, making it a standard part of English
poetry. He was the most important translator of classics into English for
hundreds of years, possibly ever. He was, without a doubt, the guy
in the London literary scene of the late 17th century, and that was a very
important scene.
That said, Dryden was roundly mocked by his contemporaries. He does not
seem to have been particularly well-liked. “There is more hostile
response to Dryden than there is to any other early modern writer—I
think than any other writer, period,” says Steven Zwicker, a
professor at Washington University in St. Louis who is one of the premier
Dryden scholars in the world.
Dryden twice stated an opposition to preposition stranding. In an afterword
for one of his own plays, he criticized Ben Jonson for doing this, saying:
“The preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him,
and which I have but lately observed in my own writing.” Later, in a
letter to a young writer who had asked for advice, he wrote: “In the
correctness of the English I remember I hinted somewhat of concludding
[sic] your sentences with prepositions or conjunctions sometimes, which is
not elegant, as in your first sentence.”
Dryden does not state why he finds this to be “not elegant.”
And yet somehow this completely unexplained, tiny criticism, buried in his
mountain of works, lodged itself in the grammarian mind, and continued to
be taught for hundreds of years later. This casual little comment would
arguably be Dryden’s most enduring creation. It’s a little bit
sad.
Following the death of Oliver Cromwell, England was in a pretty weird
place, and the English language was in a weirder one. The monarchy had been
restored, but during Cromwell’s reign an awful lot of English writing
had been stunted; for a time, plays were even banned, for fear of public
political criticism. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds, because
during the latter half of the 17th century, literacy rates in
London—by far the highest in the country—were only around 20
percent. The language evolved on the stage, and that development was paused
for a few decades.
At the time, there were at most a handful of what are called English
grammars: basically, books instructing the proper way to use the English
language. In the Restoration period, when Dryden was a star, the discussion
of exactly what the English language was (and, in turn, who the English
people were, and what England was) began to really rapidly evolve. Dryden
is not very well-known today, but at the time he was the leading literary
rockstar, and his words carried a huge amount of weight. He wasn’t
really one of the leading grammarians of his time, being focused more on
his plays and criticism, but he did, says Zwicker, have very firm opinions
about what he considered good writing and what he considered bad writing.
Other writers of the time were hostile to Dryden, attacking him for
changing his religion from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism, his
political affiliation, for his ambition, and, it seems, because he was sort
of a boring and witless conversationalist. You might expect that the guy to
ban preposition stranding would be a pithy Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde type,
full of great barbed quotes. But Dryden wasn’t that at all. “No
one admired him for his verbal wit,” says Zwicker. “Certainly
his writing is wonderful and clever, but he had practically no verbal
presence at all.”
It is actually a bit of a mystery why he was so loathed at the time;
Zwicker suggests some of it was probably envy at Dryden’s success,
some was legitimate criticism of his style, and some was vague personality
stuff. But a lot of this stuff seems like subtext, as if Dryden was
attacked because he was Dryden and the reasons given might not have been
telling the full story.
Dryden loved the classics; he was easily the most prominent translator and
critic of Ovid, Horace, and Virgil, although his translations (like a lot
of his own writing) were sort of bombastic and larger-than-life. He was
fluent in Latin and worshipped the classics. And English was in a place
where it was about to accelerate; it had been paused and now it was
un-paused. Dryden’s ideas about what English should be were heavily
motivated by Latin and Latinate ideas. It’s believed this is where
his preposition thing comes from; in Latin, the preposition, as indicated
by the first three letters of the word “preposition,” always
comes before the noun. It is assumed that this is what motivated Dryden to
make this case.
This is kind of a paradox as well; Dryden worshipped the classics, and was
motivated by classical Latin, but was a defiant modernist, maybe even a
progressive. He critiqued Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, applauded the newer
writers of his own era, invented new forms which he then sought to
popularize. But that’s the hold that the classics have: even when
you’re trying to push things forward, the classics are always there.
What’s so frustrating about this whole preposition thing is that
there doesn’t appear to be an easy answer as to how it became so
completely lodged in formal English grammar. There are all these little
hints as to why it might have taken hold—it is an easy-to-understand
grammarian rule that came about at a time and place when English grammar
was rapidly taking form, and it came from the mouth of the biggest literary
figure of the time. But like Dryden himself, it’s a hard rule to get
ahold of. Of which to get ahold.
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