On 7/11/05, Daniel Jarboe <daniel.jarboe@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bastard bought a new all-in-one CX-4600 which the newest gutenprint
> supports printing for (pardon my
> dangling gerund).
>
> gerund = verb made noun (typically with "ing")
>
> for is a preposition (but you are of course correct that it shouldn't have
> ended the sentence)
Actually, ending an English sentence with a preposition is completely
acceptable. That "rule" comes from prescriptive grammar, which is a list of
"Do"s and "Don't"s for those in the upper class, and is modeled after Latin
grammar, which used to be (and still should be) required knowledge for
anyone claiming to be educated. However, English obviously is not Latin (nor
romantic), and does not have case endings on nouns that are objects of
prepositions, so the reason for keeping prepositions and their object nouns
together is irrelevant. You may keep them together or not.
I tend to succeed my object nouns with prepositions, rather than end the
sentence with them, because it often sounds better to my ear, but one should
never clumsily re-word a sentence to avoid a final preposition.
As Winston Churchill once wrote, "This is the sort of English up with which
I will not put."
-NF
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