Re: Dangling prepositions and phrasal verbs.

Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> I've heard a disturbing number of Englishers claim that sentences like "I'm
> going out" are not kosher, on account of violating the ban on free-floating
> prepositions. Am I to understand that schools in the anglophone world do take
> the trouble to teach student not to end sentences with prepositions, but not to
> actually tell prepositions apart from the particles of phrasal verbs?!? Or are
> people just being selectively resistant to education?
I *think* it's the second.  I seem to remember learning in grade school
that the "out" in phrases like "go out" were "adverbs".  However, I do
remember that I had a lot of trouble with the concept of preposition,
and I think that was common.  So, people just get the notion that a
preposition is one of a group of words, such as "of", "out", "to", etc.,
whatever their actual usage in a sentence.  It has been my experience
that many people can't tell you what a "preposition" is.