Last evening while trying to avoid doomscrolling I browsed some movies recorded on my DVR. I noticed that the dialogue in The Maltese Falcon ends with a preposition.
I found some commentary on the phrase at Blog of the Darned:
To be fair, the quote is based on a quote from Shakespeare:Prospero:...Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuffAs dreams are made on; and our little lifeIs rounded with a sleep.The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 156–158Also "The stuff that dreams are made of" did not appear in Dashiell Hammett novel. Humphrey Bogart reportedly suggested the line to John Huston, and they went with it. Bogart was a stage actor on Broadway before turning to film, so I presumably he was familiar with The Tempest.
I'm not a rigid prescriptivist regarding usage of the English language, but last night I wondered whether any other major motion pictures end the dialogue on a preposition. A quick search of "last lines" mentions "And then I woke up" from No Country for Old Men, but in that case it would be an adverb (it's also not a preposition in "I'm ready for my close up."
There are probably many such examples. If there are movies with Minnesota characters, they might end a scene asking "are you coming with?"
I offer the challenge to the readers here. Not just any movie sentences ending with prepositions, but final words spoken in a movie.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: "Something worth fighting for."
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXWnKejVxxo
DeleteTootsie (1983): "What are you gonna use it for?"
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSff-06wXtY
Delete"The horror... the horror..."
ReplyDeleteApocalypse Now
I think the Blogspot setup doesn't allow you to insert tongue-in-cheek picture emojis. One alternative would be to use a semicolon-based smiley to indicate a wink ;-)
DeleteTesting, testing 😉
DeleteIf this turns out to work: the trick is to look up the Unicode string for the wink emoji (1f609), then add "&#x" on the left of it and ";" on the right.
My first thought was another Bogart...""Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.""
ReplyDeleteI always thought they could have killed it with "Round up the usual suspects". lol
I believe that with in "Are you coming with?" is not technically a preposition either, but an adverb. At least that's the case in the Dutch equivalent of the expression, where the preposition met (= with) changes to its adverbial form mee: Kom je mee?
ReplyDeleteThis is the sort of pedantic nonsense, up with which I will not put!
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you know this, but a long, long time ago (1762), Bishop Lowth popularized the following rules (and others) that were not part of English grammar:
ReplyDeleteYou can't have double negatives. (It's perfectly natural in many languages and manifested in Old English.)
And you can not end a sentence with a proposition.
There are others that have been the bane of many people's existence.
None of these were not adopted as part of English grammar before him.