Yes, I know, Someone told you that it is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition. Someone also told you never to split infinitives, none is always singular, and avoid the wicked passive voice, even though you're not quite sure what it is. Someone told you a lot of rubbish.
And even though you (probably) don't advocate the Ptolemaic theory that the universe revolves around the Earth or the theory that fire is the release of phlogiston from combustible substances, you continue to adhere to nonsense merely because Someone once told you so.*
Let me roll out a couple of the Big Guns.
A century ago, the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler wrote this: "It is a cherished superstition that prepositions must, in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late ('They are the fittest timber to make great politics of' said Bacon; & 'What are you hitting me for' says the modern schoolboy) be kept true to their name & placed before the word they govern."
The maintenance of this superstition, he writes, means that "immense pains are daily expended in changing spontaneous into artificial English."
More recently, Bryan Garner writes thus in Garner's Modern English Usage: "The spurious rule about not ending sentences with prepositions is a remnant of Latin grammar. ... But Latin grammar should never straitjacket English grammar."
To illustrate, he compares the "Correct and Natural" ("people worth talking to") to the "Correct and Stuffy" ("people to whom it is worth talking"). Among the examples of natural English he cites is a sentence by George Orwell: "The great majority of reviews give an inadequate or misleading account of the book that is dealt with."
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage closes its entry on the subject with a set of terminal-preposition sentences by established writers of English, including Bunyan, Swift, Johnson, Austen, Carroll, Joyce, Frost, and Thurber.
You may at this point be unconvinced, firm in your resolve never to conclude a sentence with a preposition. And this is America, where if it is your preference to sound like a prig, it is also your right.
*For a catalogue of rubbish frequently taught, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing is available by order from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and independent bookstores like The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore.
