Post
by quakeroats » Thu Feb 10, 2011 9:08 am
kublaikahn wrote:quakeroats wrote:
It's only formal to those who haven't spent any time thinking about writing well:
"For a dogmatic Prescriptivist, "Where's it at?" is double-damned as a sentence that not only ends with a preposition but whose final preposition forms a redundancy with where that's similar to the redundancy in "the reason is because" (which latter usage I'll admit makes me dig my nails into my palms). Rejoinder: First off, the avoid-terminal-prepositions rule is the invention of one Fr. R. Lowth, an eighteenth-century British preacher and indurate pedant who did things like spend scores of pages arguing for hath over the trendy and degenerate has. The a.-t.-p. rule is antiquated and stupid and only the most ayatolloid SNOOT takes it seriously. Garner himself calls the rule "stuffy" and lists all kinds of useful constructions like "the man you were listening to" that we'd have to discard or distort if we really enforced it."
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/D ... tense.html
Sage advice, Mr. Oats. But I still wonder if one will be punished for writing smartly by pedantic AdComs. Is safe better than good?
Sadly, safety is best. See my earlier post.
