[Elecraft] OT: dangles

[Lew Phelps K6LMP]

We are getting 'way off topic here, but I can't resist adding a similarly constructed sentence I learned from a professor who taught English Writing courses at Pomona College.  He sets the scene with two boys walking through a cemetery on a dark night, naturally afraid what would suddenly materialize to scare them.  One boy looks down the path and observes a large bush. He observes, "That's a good bush to be jumped out from behind of at!"

Prof. Weismiller -- like most good writers -- scorned the rule that forbids ending a sentence with a preposition. The rule is an artifact of Latin, which contributes barely more than half the vocabulary of the English language and less of its grammatical structure. 

I have been a journalist (ten years with Wall Street Journal) and a professional writer for almost half a century. I have never gone out of my way to rewrite a sentence so that it does not end in a preposition, and I have never had an editor perform such unnecessary surgery on my prose. The best rule is a simple one: if it sounds natural, use it!

73,

Lew K6LMP


On Dec 7, 2010, at 12:30 PM, David Honey wrote:

> I remember hearing Stephen Fry in a radio show talk about 
> prepositions at the end of sentences. He mentioned a competition to 
> find the most used in a sentence. The winner was a line about someone 
> reading a book about Australia and bringing it upstairs: "What did 
> you bring that book about down under up for?"
> :-)
> 
> vy 73
> David M0DHO
> 
> 
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