PREPOSITION ALERT

WE OF a certain age have been taught by Mrs. Grimbly not to end a sentence with a preposition, such as “Who are you going with?”

Winston Churchill famously (though likely apocryphally) said “That is something up with which I will not put!”

My own favorite Churchill quip is when he said of a political adversary, “Clement Atlee is a modest man who has a good deal to be modest about.” (Take that, Mrs. Grimbly.)

Another of my favorites comes from Maine friend Steve MacDonald, who offers Morris Bishop’s poem:

The Naughty Preposition

I lately lost a preposition;

It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.

And angrily I cried: “Perdition!

Up from out of in under there!”

Correctness is my vade mecum,

And straggling phrases I abhor;

And yet I wondered: “What should it come

Up from out of in under there for?”

Steve offers yet another that I’ll end with. Ha!

A father was preparing to put his son to bed, so he carried upstairs a book about Australia that he had used earlier and which the child had found uninteresting.

Upon seeing the book in his father’s hand, the boy exclaimed, “What did you bring that book that I don’t want you to read to me out of about Down Under up for?”

ds