Up with Which I Will Not Put!

Here’s a famous grammar joke about Winston Churchill. You’ve probably heard it. This version is from a 1946 story in the "Washington Post": 

[A] stuffy young Foreign Office secretary … had the job of “vetting” the then Prime Minister’s magnificent speeches. The young man disliked the P.M.’s habit of ending sentences with prepositions and corrected such sentences whenever he found them.

Finally, Mr. Churchill had enough of this! So he recorrected his own speech and sent it back to the Foreign Office with a notation in red ink, “This is the kind of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put!”

According to Fred R. Shapiro on his website “Quote Investigator,” versions of this story go back at least to 1941, and Churchill only got added to the story in 1943. But the story is still a good demonstration of how ridiculous your writing can end up sounding if you follow the rules you’re given too rigidly. 

Of course, the idea that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition has always been a bad fit with the way English grammar actually works. We’ve covered this topic in previous episodes, particularly episode 800. The fact is that English allows you a choice of what to do with a preposition when the noun phrase that would normally follow it is missing. For example, if you’re asking about your upcoming vacation plans, you could ask either “What hotel are we staying in?” with the preposition “in” at the end of the question, or “In what hotel are we staying?” with “in” moved to before the noun phrase “what hotel.”

Prepositions and particles

The complications come when we’re dealing with more than one preposition. In the Churchill joke, he moves not just the “with,” but also the “up,” away from the end of the sentence. If he had moved just the “with,” he would have ended up with: “This is the kind of pedantic nonsense with which I will not put up!” That sentence is still somewhat awkward, but not laughably so in the way that “up with which I will not put” is. 

To understand why not, we need to take a closer look at phrasal verbs. Here’s what we said about phrasal verbs in episode 608, written by Marcia Riefer Johnston:

[A] phrasal verb (such as...

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