[lutusp]

> The rule about not ending sentences with prepositions, on the other hand, is and always has been bunk.

Well, it's language, not science or mathematics. It's not as though language has rules that emanate from axioms. It's a matter of convention and consensus. And the consensus changes over time.

[kristopolous]

This is because people wanted to make English more Latin-like in the 1700s.

So Latin rules were applied to the non-Latin English language: i.e., not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions.

However, applying these rules changes meaning and tone.

English doesn't have special grammatical structures (e.g., Thai) or verb conjugations (e.g., Spanish) to discern levels of formality or tone; so we must encode them in the dynamics of the word choice and standard grammar.

Being able to form sentences in such structures is one of the primary ways in which we do this.

Double negatives are another example. In the 1700s people wanted Formal Logic rules to be in English and decided that a double negative was invalid.

However, the double negative places a meaning in the sentence that is intended by the speaker, and comprehended by the audience.

That meaning is fundamentally different from the single negative form.

Observing such restrictions create artificial barriers to communication and unnecessarily hinders the depth and character of expression.

[derleth]

However, and this is key, those rules are completely and utterly arbitrary, meaning that nobody would come up with them on their own, so knowing them meant you were taught them, and having been taught them meant you were of a high enough social class to be Our Sort. Therefore, speaking English in accordance with those rules is a class marker, something that's always useful whenever people may attempt to get Above Themselves.

Hey, it's this or going back to doing it based on skin color and last names.

[saraid216]

> nobody would come up with them on their own

Um. Someone had to.

[lutusp]

I think he meant that they came into existence ad hoc, with so many originators that its genesis would be nearly impossible to sort out.