by Kory Stamper
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 on.
Why the fuss? Dryden was a son of the Renaissance, and as such was a fan of all things classical: a classical liberal arts education, which placed an emphasis on grammar and rhetoric; the classical (and mostly Latin) authors; the elegance, concision, and precision of Latin itself. It wasn’t just a passing fancy: Dryden often translated his sentences into Latin to see how concise and elegant they were, then translated them back into English with Latin’s lovely grammar in mind. This is likely what led Dryden to deplore the terminal preposition—in Latin, prepositions can’t come at the end of sentences, and Latin is the ne plus ultra of elegance, refinement, and—most important—longevity. Dryden’s distaste for the terminal preposition was repeated and reinforced by usage writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until it became a rule.
The problem with this rule is a familiar one: English grammar is not Latin grammar. The languages are cousins, but not close ones, because they come from different branches of the Indo-European language tree. English has a grammatical structure similar to other Germanic languages, and Latin has a grammatical structure similar to other Italic languages. Blending grammatical systems from two languages on different branches of the Indo-European language tree is a bit like mixing orange juice and milk: you can do it, but it’s going to be nasty.
One of the grammatical hallmarks of English is that you can stick a preposition at the end of a sentence without any deleterious effect whatsoever. In fact, the terminal preposition isn’t just possible, but is and has been standard operating procedure for prepositions from the very beginnings of English. The terminal preposition had been in continuous, easy use seven hundred years before John Dryden was in short pants, and it continues in easy, idiomatic use. You can, of course, choose not to end your sentence with a preposition, but that is a stylistic choice, not a grammatical diktat from on high.
The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth. Many of the rules that make up the sort of grammar that Gwynne and others care about actually go against a long and established track record of use by the very authors who are championed as the practitioners (and, yea, defenders) of Proper English. In plain language, even peevers mess it up.
David Foster Wallace, modern literary titan, described himself in a famous Harper’s essay as a “snoot,” a “really extreme usage fanatic, the sort of person whose idea of Sunday fun is to look for mistakes in Safire’s column’s prose itself.” He was a prolific writer and a very careful one, too; he used “nauseated” instead of “nauseous” to mean “to feel sick,” for instance, an old grammatical peccadillo to be sure, and one that even the most prescriptivist usage commentators today merely shrug over. Bryan Garner, one of Wallace’s prescriptivist heroes, has even almost given up on this one: in his Garner’s Modern American Usage, he rates this a Stage 4 on his Language-Change Index: “The form becomes virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts.” Be that as it may, good usage mattered to Wallace. So it is a surprise to see, in one of his stories published in Harper’s, an instance of the oft-bemoaned object of snooty scorn, the figurative “literally”:
The moment hung there between us, borderless and distendent, my impulse to clear my own throat blocked only by a fear of appearing impertinent; and it was in that literally endless expectant interval that I came to see that I deferred to the infant, respected it, granted it full authority, and therefore waited, abiding, both of us in that small and shadowless father’s office, in the knowledge that I was, thenceforth, this tiny white frightening thing’s to command, its instrument or tool.
Did he mean to use it in an ironic way? Were we supposed to divine some sort of smirk in it? It’s impossible to say: all we have is this instance of the figurative “literally” in the work of an author who is known for his self-professed snoothood and his lexical precision. Another piece of evidence for the figurative “literally,” supplied by someone who would probably deplore such a hyperbolic use in anyone else’s prose.
And thus it ever was: Jonathan Swift disparages the use of contractions as evidence of “the deplorable Ignorance that for some Years hath reigned among our English Writers; the great Depravity of our Taste; and the continual Corruption of our Style,” then turns around and uses them all over the place in his Journal to Stella. E. B. White says in The Elements of Style that “certainly” is “used indiscriminately by some speakers, much as others use very, to intensify any and every statement. A mannerism of this kind, bad in speech, is even worse in writing”; it shows up in his Second Tree from the Corner (“You certainly don’t have to be a humorist to taste the sadness of situation and mood”). Lynne Truss’s book “eloquently speaks to the value of punctuation in preserving the nuances of language,” slobbers one adoring reviewer—one among many—and yet Truss commits oodles of punctuation errors throughout her own usage book on punctuation, including one on the cover: there should be a hyphen between “Zero” and “Tolerance.” Humanity sets up rules to govern English, but English rolls onward, a juggernaut crushing all in its path.*7
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This is what you, the lexicographer, must contend with as you go through your Style and Defining classes with Gil: the realization that most of these little bits of information that you’ve hoarded to fortify your defenses against linguistic and moral attack are rubbish. It is a betrayal—I wasted how many years of my life trying to master the difference between “between” and “among” when I could have been dating exciting people instead?—but one you must get over quickly. The lexicographer’s job is to tell the truth about how language is used and, in doing so, set down their own poniards. As you go through the written record, you’ll find that Shakespeare used double negatives and Jane Austen used “ain’t.” You’ll find that new and disputed coinages have come in and have not taken away from the language as it was used, but added to it; that words previously considered horrendous or ugly—words like “can’t”—are now unremarkable. In spite of all this apparent error, the lexicographer must conclude—indeed, must believe—that English is not only still alive but flourishing.
Many of the rules that have been codified into “grammar” uphold an ideal, not a reality. The grammarians of the seventeenth century onward weren’t interested so much in preserving the language as it was used as in perpetuating a re-formed idea of what language should be. The first soldiers in the fight to preserve English radically changed English, not according to the best practices of the great writers of the language, but according to their own views of elegance and correctness. What they wanted to preserve and promote didn’t, for the most part, actually exist: it was a convenient fiction that was painted in moral terms, thereby ensuring its own propagation. Let me say that again: Standard English as it is presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage. Under this mentality, the idea that the best practices of English change with time is anathema. It doesn’t preserve English so much as pickle it. It’s a circle unbroken: in ev
ery age, some learned pedant discovers all over again that English is a clunker, and they race to the rooftops to shout it to the unwashed, stupid masses and begin fomenting for a walkback. Even Samuel Johnson gets into the act:
If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.
We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.
* * *
*1 Plenty of the monarchs that we think of as fair, ruddy Englishmen and Englishwomen were actually French. King Richard the Lionheart (rule, 1189–1199), the absent monarch during Robin Hood’s fictional reign and brother to the rotten prince John, couldn’t speak a lick of English and spent most of his time in the Duchy of Aquitaine when he wasn’t smashing the Holy Land to bits or being locked up in an Austrian prison. The first truly “English” king to take the throne after the Norman Conquest was Henry VII, and he was really Welsh.
*2 on·y·mous ˈänəməs adj : bearing a name; especially : giving or bearing the author’s name
*3 reȝt, reght, reghte, reht, reit, rethe, reyȝt, reyght, reyt, reyte, rȝt (which was likely a transmission error because there’s no vowel where there should be), rich, richt, ricth, riȝ, riȝght, riȝht, riȝhte, riȝt, riȝte, riȝth, riȝtt, riȝtte, riȝty (another transmission error with that extra y), righte, rigt, rigth, rigthe, rih, rihct, rihht, rihst, riht, rihte, rihtt, rihtte, rijȝt, rist, rit, rite, rith, rithe, ritht, ritth, rothes (plural, another transmission error with that whopper of an o), rycht, ryde, ryȝ, ryȝght, ryȝht, ryȝhte, ryȝt, ryȝte, ryȝth, ryȝthe, ryȝtt, ryȝtte, ryȝtth, ryȝtthe, ryg, rygh, ryghe, ryght, ryghte, ryghtȝ, rygt, rygth, ryht, ryhte, ryt, ryte, ryth, rythe, rytht, wryght (w-, probably another transmission error), ziȝt (z-, definitely a transmission error), and, of course, right.
*4 1chan·cery ˈchan(t)-s(ə-)rē, ˈchän(t)- n -ies…2 : a record office originally for issuance and preservation of a sovereign’s diplomas, charters, and bulls and later for the collection, arrangement, and safekeeping of public archives and ecclesiastical, legal, or diplomatic proceedings (MWU)
*5 MOTH [aside]: They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
COSTARD: O! they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as “honorificabilitudinitatibus”: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon. (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.1.36–42)
*6 Lowth hammers this home by noting that even translators of the Bible can’t get this right: for “Whom do men say that I am?” (Matt. 16:13, Mark 8:27, Luke 9:18), Lowth sighs, “It ought in all these places to be who.”
*7 “Juggernaut” is an adaptation of one of the Hindi names for Vishnu, Jagannāth, “lord of the world.” Supposedly, a giant avatar of Jagannāth would be drawn through the streets on a cart during a festival, and some devotees would allow themselves to be crushed by the cart’s wheels as it passed by them. “Supposedly” is the key word in the previous sentence. For more etymological dubiosities, see the chapter “Posh.”
Irregardless
On Wrong Words
One of the tasks that every Merriam-Webster editor must do is answer editorial correspondence. Since the 1860s, dictionary users have been encouraged to write to the company with questions about its books or the English language, and some long-suffering editor will respond.
There are a few flaws in this system. The first is that the customer writing to us generally believes the prescriptivist misconception that dictionaries are gatekeepers for the language, and so when they write in, it is to froth in rage all over us at our inclusion of any word they think is unworthy. The second flaw in this system is that the person who must deal with this hysteria and give a good, calming account of why that word is in a dictionary is someone who has taken this job specifically because it promises almost no human interaction.
Unfortunately for me, I had previously held jobs where my primary duty was to be yelled at for extended periods of time by customers,*1 so I was often tasked with answering the angriest e-mails. Most of these e-mails expressed surprise, frustration, and doom over one dictionary entry or another, and it was my job to calmly explain the rationale behind that entry. I didn’t mind too much: we had ample evidence for all the entries in our dictionaries tucked away in our files, the research to answer these questions was often interesting, and at least no one was hollering at me over the phone.
That all changed one day when I was sorting through my correspondence and came across a forwarded e-mail from someone irate that we entered “irregardless” into our dictionary. I rolled my eyes: obviously “irregardless” isn’t a valid word, and so it wouldn’t be entered into our dictionaries. This correspondent had clearly just picked up any old crap dictionary, stumbled across an entry for the nonword “irregardless,” and assumed that we were at fault. Totally frustrating.
I drafted a reply that stated it wasn’t in the dictionary, and to prove it, you can visit our website and search our online dictionary for the word, where you will find the following note….Here I needed the language that we used at that point in time when someone looked up a word that wasn’t entered in our online dictionary. I opened up the site, typed in “irregardless,” and promptly lost it: “irregardless” was entered in our dictionary. So great was my surprise that I actually said, out loud and at a normal volume, “You have got to be shitting me.”
Dan Brandon, one of the science editors who sat near me, answered from the depth of his cubicle, “Probably.”
The spectrum of hatred against “irregardless” might be unmatched. Everyone claims to hate the word “moist,” but the dislike is general and jokey: ew, gross, “moist,” bleh. People’s hatred of “irregardless” is specific and vehemently serious: it cannot mean “without regard to” but must mean “with regard to,” so it’s nonsensical and shouldn’t exist; it’s a double negative and therefore not allowable by anyone with sense and judgment; it’s a redundant blend of “irrespective” and “regardless,” and we don’t need it; it is illogical and therefore not a word; it is a hallmark of uneducated speech and shouldn’t be entered into the dictionary. All of these complaints point in one direction: “irregardless” is evidence that English is going to hell, and you, Merriam-Webster, are skipping down the easy path, merrily swinging the handbasket.
The truth is I felt for the complainant. “Irregardless” was just wrong, I thought—I knew this deep down at a molecular level, and no dictionary entry was going to convince me otherwise. But sharing my personal linguistic beef with the world was not part of the job, so I buttoned my yap and answered the correspondence. Yes, it’s entered, I said, but please note that it’s marked “nonstandard” (which is a fancy way of saying it’s not accepted by most educated speakers of English) and we have a very long usage paragraph after the one-word definition that explains you should use “regardless” instead. We are duty-bound to record the language as
it is used, I concluded, gritting my teeth and mentally sprinkling scare quotes throughout the entire sentence.
I had hoped this would be an isolated letter, but no: more came in, and I had to answer each of them point for point. I regret to inform you, I would write, that “irregardless” is in fact a word: it is a “series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use,”*2 and not only is it a word, but it is one with a surprising amount of use in written, edited prose for reasons that are unclear to the humble drudge. Yes, “irregardless” looks like it should mean “with regard to,” but that’s not how people use it, and the dictionary is about the business of recording how people use words. True, it is a double negative, but that doesn’t negate (ha-ha) the fact that people still use it in speech and writing. Redundancy in English vocabulary is commonplace—this isn’t a detriment, just a fact—and we cannot strike “irregardless” from the record for being redundant, because we’d have to burn down half of the language if we start cutting redundant words out of it. You are correct that “irregardless” is an illogical coinage, but so is “inflammable” to mean “able to catch fire” and “unthaw” to mean “to thaw,” and yet no one disputes that those are words. And of course we understand that “irregardless” is generally thought to be incorrect; that’s why the lengthy usage paragraph suggests—in spite of our being liberal commie descriptivists—that people use “regardless” instead of “irregardless.” Thank you for taking the time to write.