Irene, Kate and I took the boys to the Botanical Gardens today to see the butterflies (and to take many, many pictures).
I’ve posted a whole lotta butterfly and flower pictures. Tomorrow – the orchids.
Something up with Which I Will Not Put
The OLD blog by Maggie
Irene, Kate and I took the boys to the Botanical Gardens today to see the butterflies (and to take many, many pictures).
I’ve posted a whole lotta butterfly and flower pictures. Tomorrow – the orchids.
This has nothing to do with your post, just your title… I did a search for that line attributed to Churchill, and this site came up…
I just think it’s funny that while he avoided ending his sentence in a preposition, he doubled up prepositions (up with) which is also a grievous grammatical error. Quite a language we speak (fragment).
Indeed – of course, Churchill was taking the piss out of a rather pedantic grammarian who insisted that prepositions at the ends of sentences were evil; personally, my pet peeve is people who insist that one should never, ever split an infinitive, no matter how awkward the resulting construction may be.
Not to endlessly belabour the point, it just seems a little over the top. We speak (and read and write) a language that shamelessly steals words, idioms, grammar and construction from every language and culture it meets. We shouldn’t be so uptight about it!
From Richard Lederer: Did you hear about the boy who asked his father, “What did you bring that book about Down Under up for?”
Ol’ Winston probably wishes he had thought of that!
One of my favourites! Of course, I can never remember all of the prepositions at any one time 😉
I don’t know if prepositions were ever an issue for your students, Vicki – a lot of mine are second language students, and a lot of those are French speakers. They grow up speaking “street” English here in bilingual Quebec, and prepositions are a major issue, because they do direct translations. The result – statements like “I went at the library yesterday.”