This is number eighty-two in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHERE Y’ALL FROM?” asked the Southern Belle.
“Where I’m from we don’t end sentences with a preposition,” replied the snooty Yankee.
“So, where y’all from, bitch?”
Yes, we English speakers were all taught that we shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. That wasn’t even a rule until the 17th century when a self-styled grammarian made the statement. But, even then, we don’t always get it right.
In the example above, the first sentence is a fine example of having things understood in colloquial English. While the rule, when interpreted strictly, would require a sentence that said “From where are y’all?” it is awkward and absolutely no one would actually speak that way.
And that is what we’re all about in this post: Rules that get tossed around by the grammar police, but aren’t as absolute as they’d like to believe.
When I wrote Devon Layne’s Redtail back in 2013, I started the story with a deliberate misunderstanding of a question. Cole is asked about his “first time” by a counselor. In our prurient minds, we might jump to the conclusion that the counselor is asking about his first time having sex. And, indeed, Cole launches into a salacious description about what could have been considered a first time having oral sex.
“Why is it that everybody wants to know about your first time? What kind of voyeurs are we? Do we just want to compare to see that we weren’t the only ones who were somehow disappointed? Or to prove that our experiences were so far better than everyone else? Or to participate vicariously in something we lost long ago? The first time. The first time.”
It turned out that his description was of the first time eating oysters. It is revealed, however, that both interpretations are false. What’s really being discussed is his first time as a time traveler.
And so it is with many rules of the English language. They have to be taken in context, not merely as a hard and fast rule.
The three-book Erotic Paranormal Romance Western Adventures series is available as a collection or as individual eBooks at Bookapy, and in paperback from other online resellers.
In the 1940s, a popular joke was credited to several sources, including a clerk, an army officer, and others, but was most frequently ascribed to Winston Churchill, simply because he was the most famous personage. The actual source is unknown.
It is said that Churchill circulated a document for comment and approval and was severely criticized for ending sentences with a preposition. His response was “This is the kind of pedantry up with which I will not put.”
Yes, the phrasing certainly makes the point of not ending the sentence “This is the kind of pedantry I will not put up with” with a preposition. However, the latter is not only far clearer, but is actually correct! What we miss is that the entire phrase ‘put up with’ is referred to as a ‘phrasal verb’ and is treated exactly as a verb. To “put up with” means to “tolerate.” It is not treated as a preposition at all!
Can you give us some other examples, Devon? Well, certainly.
“That is a woman you would never run out on.”
“She is someone I’d really like to get together with.”
“She has the kind of personality you can really feed off of.”
Those are all phrasal verbs. In most instances, a phrasal verb could be replaced with a different single word verb. “Run out on,” for example, means “abandon.” Of course, they don’t always appear at the end of a sentences. We use them all the time, but never stop to figure out what they are called.
“I’d never run out on her.”
Who is this woman? Well, I do write erotica, so you can choose almost any of my characters to cozy up to.
English has all kinds of ‘rules’ that just don’t always apply. For example, we are taught the spelling rule “i before e except after c.”
Except when your foreign neighbor Keith gets eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters!
And if you try to alter the rule by explaining that it only applies to words in which the ‘ie’ rhymes with ‘bee,’ let me remind you of caffeine, plebeian, protein, seize, and Keith. I’m afraid you will find more words in the English language that break the rule than follow it!
This is so much fun! Here’s another hard and fast rule in English: Use the indefinite article ‘a’ before a consonant and ‘an’ before a vowel. Of course, the first example that comes up, people think of as just being a rare exception: “It’s an honor to meet you.” Okay. So, except before ‘h’. But it goes much deeper than that.
This is one of the cases (remind me to address apostrophes sometime) when the spoken word trumps the written rule. Whether the letter used to spell the word is a consonant or vowel is not as important as the sound it makes.
It is an honor to meet you.
He is a humble man.
She is an MIT graduate.
She went to a university.
In each of these instances, it is the sound of the initial letter that determines which article to use, not the letter itself.
Some people look at the exceptions to our English language rules as being something that destroys the purity of the language. Early spellcheckers, like some editors, determined incorrect words based solely on the rules and blindly corrected to the rule. This is an inherent danger with the new generative AI algorithms. We have no guardian checking AI to see if it is using the correct grammatical form or only the most popular. That’s why so much AI generated text sounds like a speech given by a presidential candidate. It has no filter to determine what is actually correct English.
James Nicoll, a Canadian freelance game and speculative fiction reviewer, turned a phrase in a 1990 article on Usenet that has been adopted and adapted to memes for twenty years or more.
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Indeed, many of the rules of English simply don’t apply to the homogeneity of our mostly-borrowed language. If you’d like genuine pure English, perhaps you should go back a millennium or so ago and try this on:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Even the British no longer write like Chaucer did in 1400, let alone like the anonymous author of Beowulf just 400 years earlier!
Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum
þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon
hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon.
English has never been easy!
I’ll continue with good writing gone bad in next week’s posting on punctuation. Don’t try this in a text message. You’ll be marked as an old man! “Let’s Eat Grandma.”