Language – Author Sarah Angleton

There’s a video put out by the folks of Miriam-Webster that has been floating around. It’s worth a little thinking about. It suggests that, despite what your third grade teacher taught you, a preposition might not be the most terrible thing to end a sentence with.

In fact, these language experts who, mind you, have now decided to include the nonsensical “irregardless” in their dictionary, point to the history of English to rest their case upon. They suspect it began with a little known 17th century grammarian named Joshua Poole whose work, The English Accidence, does mention that one should use prepositions following only the natural order they should appear in.

England’s first Poet Laureate John Dryden apparently agreed with him, and once took critical aim at poet Ben Johnson’s use of the line: “The bodies that those souls were frighted from.” Because Dryden used to translate his own work into Latin as a way to revise for concise and elegant language, the assumption is that he preferred the grammatical rules of Latin to force English into.

If you want to get creative with prepositions, you’ll have to think outside the box. Or in it. Or on it. Or around it. Image by Agata from Pixabay

Whether this was the real reason for his preference, however, doesn’t totally shine through. Dryden did also once take himself to task for occasionally spotting a line or two in his own work where a sentence-ending preposition had slipped out.

All writers have preferences they rarely go against. It’s certainly not a habit that I can claim to be above. Still, it’s unclear why this particular preference of this particular poet became a hard and fast rule no student could live without. What is certain is that in the wake of Miriam-Webster’s claim that the rule never was a rule, the debate has been a furious one that it may take some time to get over. This is a topic that sure gets people worked up.

I do appreciate that language evolves and I try not to be too pretentious about it, but based on this brief experiment with lackluster, and maybe even just plain strange sentence structures, I don’t think I’m ready yet to throw the rule out. All I can say is that I will certainly think it through.

Lately I’ve been feeling my age pretty keenly. It’s not that I’m old, but I am solidly middle-aged, not yet quite to the morning/evening pill divider, but well beyond the days of waking up without back pain. For the most part, I don’t mind too much. Getting older, after all, beats the alternative, but I do sometimes marvel at the fact that I have no idea what the young’uns are talking about.

I mean, I’m definitely young enough to enjoy a good birthday cake, but I’m also old enough there’s no way anyone is lighting that many candles. Image by Marco Apolinário from Pixabay

Because middle age also falls somewhere between no longer being able to hear what the kids are saying and no longer understanding it. This, more than anything except perhaps for the regularity with which I ask my sons to help me fix whatever stupid thing I’ve done to my computer, makes me aware of my age.

It doesn’t help that I celebrated a birthday last week, in that way middle aged mothers do. The hubs, bless him, slaved away over the grill to make me a special meal that we ate alone because my teenage sons each made plans to not celebrate their mother’s birthday.

That’s fine because they’re sigmas with rizz and they got that drip, so it stands to reason they’d have plans extending beyond their dad’s bussin steak. Too bad for them because it slapped. No Cap.

Yeah, I don’t know what I just wrote, either, though I’m fairly certain I used every bit of that gen Z slang just a little bit incorrectly.

I find myself longing for the good old days when we said logical things like “totes magotes.” Image by Chräcker Heller from Pixabay

And that’s kind of what it’s for anyway. The term slang has existed since at least the 1740s when it referred to the speech of thieves and beggars rather than teenagers, but I’m betting the concept has been around pretty much since the dawn of speech, with each generation’s drive to distinguish itself just a little bit from its elders.

Personally, I used to really enjoy slang. I was a totally rad preteen in the 1980s. Then as a teenager in the 90s I was all that and a bag of chips. I chillaxed through my twenties in the 2000s, and in the 2010s this thirty-something was a little bit extra.

But now in the 2020s, I’m mostly just tired of all this skibidi Ohio brain rot. As far as I’m concerned all these sus kids are delulu. But now I’m just talking out of pocket.

I think.