Ray Brown wrote:
>
> On Saturday, June 19, 2004, at 05:27 , Ph. D. wrote:
>
> > What we were
> > taught as prohibited are sentences such as "Whom do you
> > want to eat with?" since these could be rephrased as
> > "With whom do you want to eat?"
>
> We were not even taught that! We were taught that the 'dangling
> prepositions' (I don't think it was called that, but that's what was
meant)
> was a feature of English that made it different from its near continental
> cousins. The sentence often quoted was Churchill's (apocryphal?) "..a rule
> up with which I will not put" to show how silly it was to be
over-pedantic.
>
> In fact "Whom do you eat with?" is surely artificial. We would have been
> taught, I'm certain, that:
> "Who do you eat with?" is the normal colloquial form;
> "With whom do you eat?" is formal and literary.
> *"Whom do you eat with?" is neither colloquial not literary.
Agreed. A poor choice on my part. I wanted my two sample
sentences to be the same except for the placement of "with."
(Although I have heard people say "Whom do you eat with?"
when they are consiously trying to be correct and are using
"whom" exclusively.)
> But at some point, I think with the spread of comprehensive
> education, it was considered that grammar inhibited creative
> writing and gave those kids who couldn't analyze & parse a
> sense of inferiority - so grammar was downgraded (as was
> spelling & punctuation) and creativity was king. When I was
> involved in secondary education, scarcely any grammar was
> taught in English and not much in modern languages. I've
> been out of secondary education since 1990, but I don't think
> there's been any significant shift since then (not judging from
> the English my college students write) in English.
I think that pretty much sums up the case in the United
States. Creative writing was given top priority, and
grammar was considered unimportant.
--Ph. D.