Opinion Express View on prepositions: Sense of an ending

This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put,” Winston Churchill is claimed to have said, rebelling against the autocracy of grammar Nazis insisting that no sentence in the English language take recourse to prepositions as a note to end on. Merriam-Webster seems to have realised the merit in Churchill’s argument: In a shock declaration, the publisher of the eponymous American dictionary and reference books has announced that it is perfectly acceptable to do so. “The idea that it should be avoided came from writers who were trying to align the language with Latin, but there is no reason to suggest ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong,” it announced on social media, riling up purists who claimed that the venerable institution has little idea about the pandora’s box its verdict would open up.

Truth be told, the preposition dilemma has haunted the English language for long. Like the Oxford comma or starting a sentence with a conjunction, the use of prepositions at the end of the sentence is something that the jury has been unable to agree upon. Merriam-Webster had first waded into the debate in 2020, claiming that the obduracy to embrace prepositions at the end of a sentence was an an inherited snobbery, espoused by the 17th century poet and literary critic, John Dryden, who had acquired it himself from the grammarian Joshua Poole. The latter had, in his 1646 treatise, The English Accidence, set out “a short, plaine, and easie way for the more speedy attaining to the Latine tongue, by the help of the English”. It is this tyranny, Merriam-Webster asserted, that has made miserable the lives of English language speakers, and one whose time had come to be rid of.

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Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that Merriam-Webster’s proclamation helps open possibilities up. After all, what indeed is language if it does not update itself periodically to best represent the time it speaks for. That is a freedom one must not let go of.