I heard the following comment on ESPN:
Expand the list of teams to which he is willing to be traded to.
It made me laugh and cringe all at the same time. The speaker (1) had very clearly had the “to which” construction, and he thought it sounded smart. When properly used, it allows a writer to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. It seems that the speaker did not realize that, and ended the sentence with a preposition anyway.
You may say that he misspoke, but I don’t think so. I hear this all the time, and while I appreciate the effort at trying to sound smart, I would prefer that people actually were smart, or at least spoke at their level. I don’t have a particularly large vocabulary, but I also don’t fake it.
Now I was trained by a rather strict grammarian myself (2), and as such, she enforced the rule that I should never, under ay circumstance, end a sentence with a preposition. I generally follow that rule (3), but more religiously follow a better rule that she taught me: if you need to move a preposition before “which”, then you need to rewrite the sentence to sound less awkward. So that’s what I tend to do that.
Oh and not to mention that “they” no longer teach or follow that rule.
(1) I couldn’t bring myself to use the “word” commentator in a post about grammar
(2) Her name is Julia Strasser
(3) In my real writing, not here. This is just fun and games
2 Comments
“So that’s WHY I tend to do that.”
On those few of your log entries addressing grammar, typographical errors blunt the force of your argument. That may be a situation up with which you should not put.
That’s a fair point. Originally, the “about the site” section said:
“I’m a student like you might find at pretty much anywhere. I like writing, as long as I don’t get graded, I don’t have to proofread, and I can write about whatever ridiculous thought is in my fleeting mind at the time.”
I guess this falls under the no proofreading category.
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