avoiding terminal preposition

[Booth, Curtis]

An alternative strategy is to not tie any knots at all but to just leave out
any prepositions that might be clause final or doubled because one of them
is clause final, as in this delightful example:
"One of the properties of Unicode is that the character values are in the
order a native speaker would normally type them, which is not necessarily
the order they may appear in the final rendering."

                -----Original Message-----
                From:   Arnold Zwicky [mailto:zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU]
                Sent:   Monday, September 17, 2001 4:43 PM
                To:     ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
                Subject:        avoiding terminal preposition

                i suppose that scholars of english grammar all have their
own
                collections of idioms and constructions that cry out for a
                clause-final stranded preposition (the usage handbooks list
a variety
                of these), as well as collections of cites where people tied
                themselves in tortured knots so as to avoid the dreaded
terminal
                preposition.

                here's a nice example i heard on a local show ("Minds Over
Matter") on
                the san francisco radio station KALW.  talking about a city
street,
                one of the panelists asked, "Who is it named after?  I mean,
for
                whom is it named?"

                what makes the example nice is that the speaker didn't just
shift
                from a stranded preposition to its pied-piped equivalent
("After
                whom is it named?" - which to my ear is just awful, though
perhaps
                not so bad as "After which parent does Kim take?" as a
substitute for
                "Which parent does Kim take after?", or "For what did you
eat that
                fish?" as a substitute for "What did you eat that fish
for?"),
                but seems to have unconsciously perceived where that
strategy would
                lead her and shifted the preposition as well, to one that's
more
                acceptable in pied piping.

                arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), looking for diversions