The very pineapple of politeness, by Catriona

What’s your position on ending a sentence with a preposition, grammar others might be afraid of? What non-grammatical writing styles do you firmly support?

These people would never!
And so I don't when I write them

Picture the scene: an overtired child hears her mummy (US "mommy"  - this isn't a scene from a horror film) coming upstairs. The child is hoping Mummy has brought the storybook she wants and not that other one the child can't stand. (Granny has terrible taste in books.) Mummy comes into the bedroom. Disaster! It's the boring granny book - no monsters, no magic, no miracles - so the child whines the following, perfectly fine English sentence:

        Mummy, what did you bring that book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?

If the child had tried to ask the same brattish but otherwise reasonable question, while following the invented rules of old-timey, self-appointed prescriptive grammarians who knew nothing - nothing - about how language works, she'd have said:

        Mummy why did you bring up that book out of which I didn't want to be read a story?

And, clearly, this would then be a horror film, because that isn't a child; that's either a badly programmed robot or the restless spirit of Lindley Murray who has pulled on a kid suit.

Ah, Lindley Murray. That fragile, controlling, miserable, would-be boss-man who could have looked at the wild and joyous flowering of English and revelled in it, but who couldn't cope and tried, instead, to impose baseless rules and shut the fun down. (He wasn't the only one but he's the one whose name I can remember as I sit typing this in the car dealership, away from my reference books on the history of English.)

I think he's also responsible for the nonsense about splitting infinitives, isn't he? And the "argument" supporting both these rules is the same. 

He started with a bit of honest linguistic observation - noting that Latin infinitive verbs were single words (e.g. legere "to read") and Latin used noun endings to mark case (e.g. liber, libri, libro "the book, of the book, to the book"). Okay. 

He added a completely unrelated bit of honest linguistic observation - that English infinitves are made up to two words, the first of which is "to" and English can mark case with two words, the first of which is a preposition, like "of" and "to". (See above). Okay.

Then he turned over two pages at once and did a very strange thing - he proclaimed that English couldn't have its usual party with word order and twiddly bits if it meant splitting the two words of an infinitive or separating a preposition from its noun. Ummmmm.

And finally, he slid a springbok under a petrie dish and called it Wednesday. That is, he "explained" that English couldn't do it because Latin couldn't do it. I mean . . . Mandarin does it with tone, Lindley old chum. But that doesn't mean English doesn't mean anything if you whisper.

Now, just like the bagless vacuum cleaner (that puffs all the dust back out when you empty it) and the sofa-bed (torture as both a sofa and a bed) this daft idea took off like a rocket. Lindley's ravings became the rules of codified standard English, the shibboleths by means of which speakers and writers of English the world over could be sorted into educated elites and the likes of me.

For teachers, this is thorny. While the power - to grant a university place, to offer a job, to go for community service instead of jail time - resides with people who care about that stuff, it's a good idea to have the snottiest, prissiest English up your sleeve and know when to wheel it out.

For writers, it's much more straightforward and much much more fun. We can write characters who either have or haven't had these arbitrary rules drummed into them, who either care about them or don't. Most fun of all are characters who care and strive and fail. We view them, like Mrs Malaprop trying to say "pinnacle" (see blog title), in all their pride and vulnerability, and can either ache for them or cackle as the story requires.

It was probably Stephen King who said that formal standard English is a useful tool to have in the writer's toolbox, but it's only one of many. I'm glad I've got it, but I'm glad I'm the boss of it and it's not the boss of me.

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