Hi kids, just got back from two weeks in Japan. Did you miss me?

Huh? Didn’t know I was away? Ah, the seamless blog posting every morning fooled you, eh? Well, that shouldn’t surprise you, not if you remember my entry on writing blog entries in advance.

Hhm? You what? Y.. you.. you don’t remember it?? Shame on you. Here it is: "Writing Better Blog Posts With WordPress". See?

Prepositions

Today I’d like to give a brief introduction to the preposition. A preposition is a joiner put before other words to invite them into the sentence. For example after, before, behind, by, to and since. "I could hear Halle Berry calling my name across the room."

We have a convention in English not to use prepositions at the end of sentences. It’s thought to come from grammarians looking at how Latin doesn’t allow them and simply applying the same rule to English. But English isn’t Latin and doesn’t have to follow the same rules, especially in spoken language. Rather than saying "for what are we waiting?", "what are we waiting for?" sounds more natural, surely? And you wouldn’t say "from where did he come?", would you? You’d say "where did he come from?"

Winston Churchill himself lampooned the convention, writing "This is the sort of English up with which I cannot put."

I’ll come back to prepositions at a later date, because I’ve really only scratched the surface today. They are something I have great problems getting right, so thinking about them any more and trying to point my thoughts down on pixels will only cause my head to explode. And no one wants that.

Hope you’re enjoying this blog. If you are, how’s about clicking on the “blogged” graphic to the side and rating “Daniboy Writes”? You’ll have to register with them to do so, but that’ll only take a few seconds and they have a no-contact guarantee. G’wan, why don’t ye?