Thursday, October 25, 2007

More On The Terminal Preposition

In researching the last post, I found the following and had to share it. It comes from Mark Israel at http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxprepos.html.

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The Guinness Book of (World) Records used to have a category for "most prepositions at end." The incumbent record was a sentence put into the mouth of a boy who didn't want to be read excerpts from a book about Australia as a bedtime story:

"What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to from out of about 'Down Under' up for?"

Mark Brader (all this is to the best of his recollection; he didn't save the letter, and doesn't have access to the British editions) wrote to Guinness, asking: "What did you say that the sentence with the most prepositions at the end was 'What did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to from out of about "Down Under" up for?' for? The preceding sentence has one more." Norris McWhirter replied, promising to include this improvement in the next British edition, but actually it seems that Guinness, no doubt eventually realising that this could be done recursively, dropped the category.

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