One year I gave my friend Helen a birthday card that incorporated this grammatical joke.
Scene: Two women who appear to be college students talking in a restaurant.
Woman #1: What time is the party at?
Woman #2: Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.
Open up the card for the punchline, same picture.
Woman #1: What time is the party at, bitch?
Leave it to the wonderful editors at Webster.com to finally put this misnomer to rest! For years I have been wasting the energy to dodge this as often as I feasibly could, assuming it was the correct method like writing in the active voice and cutting down on prepositional phrases when adjectives or possessive pronouns were more efficient. (Maybe I need more work on my run-on sentences.)
Now with Webster’s blessing, I feel somewhat better about my writing style and my irritation at Latin has been raised a tad.
As Churchill once said, “That’s the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.”
Cindy, if you watched the video, the editor uses this and she couldn’t confirm he really said it unlike Orwell could on Churchill’s sympathies for Fascists.