Gramer Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today we'll

talk about a famous joke from Winston Churchill and about two spellings of the word discrete.

Here's a famous grammar joke about Winston Churchill you've probably heard it. This version

is from a 1946 story in the Washington Post. A stuffy young foreign office secretary had the

job of vetting the then prime ministers magnificent speeches. The young man disliked the prime ministers

habit of ending sentences with prepositions and corrected such sentences whenever he found them.

Finally, Mr. Churchill had had enough of this, so he re-corrected his own speech and sent it back

to the foreign office with a notation in red ink. This is the kind of pedantic nonsense up with which

I will not put. According to Garcin O'Toole on his website quote investigator versions of this

story go back at least to 1941 and Churchill only got added to the story in 1943. I'll put a

link in the show notes at quickinteritytips.com. But the story is still a good demonstration of how

ridiculous your writing can end up sounding if you follow the rules you're given too rigidly.

Of course the idea that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition has always been a bad

fit with the way English grammar actually works. We covered this topic in previous episodes,

particularly episode 800. The fact is that English allows you a choice of what to do with a

preposition when the noun phrase that would normally follow it is missing. For example,

if you're asking about your upcoming vacation plans you could ask either what hotel are we staying

in with a preposition in at the end of the question or in what hotel are we staying

within moved to before the noun phrase what hotel. The complication comes when we're dealing with

more than one preposition. In the Churchill joke he moves not just the width but also the up

away from the end of the sentence. If he had moved just the width he would have ended up with

...