Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

So where do these rules come from, if not from actual use? Most of them are the personal peeves, codified into law, of dead white men of yore. Take, for example, the rule that we’re not to end sentences with prepositions. It’s one that is drummed into most young writers at some point in their careers, and failing to heed it will result in some teacherly knuckle smacking (literal or figurative). If you ask a modern adherent to this rule why, exactly, you aren’t supposed to end a sentence with a preposition, they merely goggle at you as if you had just asked why you aren’t supposed to lick electrical sockets. Because it’s objectively better not to, that’s why. The rule itself was first articulated by the seventeenth-century poet and literary critic John Dryden. He had used the terminal preposition in his early works, but as he aged and gave himself wholly over to the glories of Latin, he decided against its use: I cast my eyes but by chance on Catiline; and in the three or four last pages, found enough to conclude that [Ben] Jonson writ not correctly….The preposition in the end of the sentence; a common fault with him, and which I have but lately observed in my own writings. When his works were reprinted later in his life, he took the opportunity to tidy up some of the follies of youth, and the terminal preposition was one such folly. Later editions of his work are carefully scrubbed of terminal prepositions: “the age which I live in” became “the age in which I live” and so ...