On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 13:23:42 -0800, Miss Elaine Eos
<Misc@*your-shoes*PlayNaked.com> wrote:
> Fun with avoiding trailing prepositions:
>
> I was once talking to my flight-instructor about flying somewhere,
> finding your intended airport fogged-in, then having to return to your
> original airport, and finding it fogged-in, also. I started to say
> something about "...the airport we are fogged-in to", but mentally
> corrected it to "the airport to which we are fogged-in", which made me
> balk until I evetually came up with "the airport into which we are
> fogged", which still wasn't satisfactory.
>
> It took me a while to realize that "fogged-in" is not a preposition but,
> rather, an adjective, and a perfectly valid way to end a sentence.
Yes, that's the error in the famous "It is a thing up with which I will
not put", the phrase "put up with" includes words which are normally
prepositions but in this case are part of a single element ("I will not
put-up-with it", comparable to "I will not tolerate it").
> Still, it had me going, for a while...
The sentence with trailing prepositions which really confused me, many
years ago, was from a C&W song on the radio:
Why have you left the one you left me for?
It started off fine:
Why have you left the one?
Why have you left (the one [that] you left me)?
It then got 'for' on the end which completely threw me. I eventually
worked out that it was supposed to be equivalent to:
Why have you left the one for whom you left me?
The latter, however, I find easy to parse, rather than having to reparse
when reaching the last word...
(German doesn't bother me in the same way, because it is obvious there
that the sentence can't be parsed until (at least) the verb is reached,
and if that is at the end of the sentence that's not a problem. In
English, when the sentence does parse properly up to that last
preposition which then alters the structure, it is a cognitive
dissonnance.)
I enjoy language.
Chris C
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