Thursday, November 11, 2010

Quotes of the weak

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
           -- Sir Winston Churchill

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.
           -- Marie Curie, Letter to her brother, 1894

If Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
           -- Marcus Bridgstocke

11 comments:

TC [Girl] said...

Sir Winston Churchill sounds like Yoda, not he does? ;-)

Miserere said...

Sir Winston Churchill sounds like Yoda, not he does? ;-)

That's what you sound like when you follow the absurd American rule that you cannot end sentences with a preposition.

If there are any readers in the US, please do your part and place prepositions at the end of sentences when you have to. Don't participate in the conspiracy to abolish prepositions from the end of sentences! It's a rule I will not put up with.

Anonymous said...

That's not an American rule. It's British. Research the name Robert Lowth. It comes from trying to apply Latin grammar rules to English.

ttl said...

That's not an American rule. It's British.

Exactly. At least the British are civilized enough to have made an attempt to stop the vulgar practice of ending a sentence with a preposition.

I say, we need to clean this place up.

Pop! said...

“This is a misattribution up with which I will not put!" — Winston Churchill

Anonymous said...

Well, if it was good enough for the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and slew of others...

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Miserere said...

Dave, you'll find that no school in Britain teaches you not to end sentences with a preposition, while in the US they still seem to do it. Since moving to the US I've actually had people tell me off for ending sentences with prepositions! In fact, it wasn't until I came to the US that I learnt about this "rule".

So while it may have been us Brits who came up with the silly rule, we've long figured out it's stupid and moved our lives on with.

http://grammar.about.com/b/2008/03/26/prepositions-ending-sentences-with.htm

Anonymous said...

I don't know that Churchill, Curie, and Bridgstocke are weak.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Notatall, I just got tired of writing "week".

Anonymous said...

Dave, you'll find that no school in Britain teaches you not to end sentences with a preposition, while in the US they still seem to do it.

I've grown up here, and while it's true that rule is taught, I wonder why because in high school and college we always were encouraged to ignore it whenever following it would have resulted in a very awkward sentence (which is almost always). I have no idea what they teach in England. It may be that it's an absurd rule Americans say they folow but don't.