Coming up on Word Matters, what you're not supposed to end a sentence with.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Of all the various grammar dicta that get meaded out,
the one about never ending a sentence with a preposition seems to have a special place in the grammar dicta pantheon.
Well, as our repeat listeners will surely expect, its vaunted position is in need of adjustment.
Here's Amon Shea with a chisel.
A lot of the peeps that we come up against are fairly recent.
Finalize is an inelegant word.
It comes from the early 20th century, even though the word itself has been around since the 1780s.
We're constantly coming up with new peeves to replace the old ones.
For instance, it used to be considered improper to use like as a coordinating conjunction.
One should use the word such as and and then we've kind of gotten rid of that as a peeve and we've moved on to being upset that people often thought to be young people but in fact everybody used like in such roles as approximative adverb.
Coney Island's got to be like 50 miles away from here as a quota of compartmentalizer.
And she was like, I'm going to find you money if you don't stop saying like,
so we've shifted that peeve.
But there are other peeps which have really kind of stuck around and shown a staying power that is really remarkable.
I think the longest running thing which we've been trying in vain to make people not do when they speak and write English.
and which they keep on doing is that of ending a sentence with a preposition.