Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 01, 2022

I see what Mallett is up to.

Someone told me that they had a sentence that ended with five prepositions. It was a child’s question regarding the choice of an Australia travelogue as a bedtime story: “Mommy, why did you bring that book about Down Under up for?”

Relating negatives and prepositions is not anything anyone would think of.

Couldn’t remember the word "Imperative Jef? Just teasing. You’re only allowed to end a sentence like that with a question mark if you’re Irish.

Now this one is interesting. Churchill was once corrected for ending a sentence with a preposition. He supposedly replied, This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put. If he didn’t say it, it’s still his style of put-down.

What he’s doing she’s on to. She knows what he’s up to. It’s not nothing but she won’t not “punish” him by playing his game his way.

This ridiculous “rule” started because there was a time when grammarians thought English should conform to Latin grammar. Which is (see Winston Churchill’s remark two posts above).

Who else is sick of grammar rules? I know I’m

An old joke … An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.” A voice from the back of the room piped up, “Yeah, right.”

I ain’t got no…. satisfaction….

Ok, slightly better than two weeks of dissecting paradoxes.

A double negative is NOT essentially a positive – except in algebra. In English grammar, negatives are cumulative.

This is something up with which I will not put.

Clever.

“Put up,” “stress out,” and “whiff off” (euphemism for “piss off”?) are either phrasal verbs or verbs followed by adverbs; “up,” “out,” and “off” are not being used as prepositions in those cases.

But as others have already commented, the English rule against ending sentences with prepositions was invented by 17th century pedants based on a false parallelism with Latin and is now as much a source of humor as it is a serious concern of writers and editors.

Ahh, there’s our little precocious, gifted, angel. Running off to his best mate the Janitor, looking for consolation that his admitted attempts at harassing his teacher didn’t work.

Strictly speaking, in this context, “up,” “out,” and “off” are adverbs, not prepositions.

One of my major pet peeves is that of the professionals in the media leaving hanging prepositions at the end of sentences.

Those are adverbs, not prepositions. Even if actual prepositions were at stake, that “rule” was invented out of nothing by John Dryden in 1672. Nobody had heard of such a thing prior to that, and H. W. Fowler, in his magisterial Modern English Usage of 1926, skewers the “rule” as a “cherished superstition”.

up with, out over, off at. oho

Some people claim that the only reason for the objection to ending a a sentence with a preposition is because it’s forbidden in Latin.

Jef Mallett: It’s an impossibility, but you get more clever every day.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is not something up with which I would put.

Someone said, “Two negatives make a positive, but two positives don’t make a negative.” And the reply to that is, “Yeah. Right!”

-1 + -1 = -2

-1 – (-1) = 0

negative energy squared is still negative.

you just gotta love English to enjoy this. And I do.

Oooh, yes! It’s GRAMMAR FUN day!