In his book on Colloquial English, Professor Andrew Radford has documented the fascinating phenomenon of British broadcasters using “preposition doubling”. This means that they employ grammatical constructions like “Tiger Woods, about whom this Masters seems to be all about, is due to tee off shortly”.
The question is: why would anybody repeat the word about in that way?
In sentences like “The shelf that I took it from”, the preposition from is technically said to be “stranded” – left alone at the end of a sentence. In everyday English, preposition stranding is the norm: “Who were you talking about?”; “The notebook I wrote in”; “The place they’d come from”.
When I went to school, though, we were told that this was “wrong” – because “you should not end a sentence with a preposition”. I now see that there is only one sensible riposte to this admonition: “Why not?” But what was the thinking behind these attempts to try and teach us such a non-existent “rule”?
Preposition stranding is a typical grammatical characteristic of English, as well as of the Scandinavian languages. The problem is that it did not occur in Latin (and is today mostly absent from French). So at the time when Latin was the international language of learning and scholarship, this difference between Latin and English grammar gave rise to an unfortunate linguistic neurosis in the anglophone world. The “rule” was the result of a sad, centuries-old English inferiority complex with respect to the supposedly superior syntax of Latin, where preposition stranding does not occur, over English syntax, where it does.
Teachers in my day had been brainwashed by generations of self-appointed, would-be improvers of the English language, who for centuries had been campaigning to remove preposition stranding from English and replace it with Latin-style structures modelled on French: Le cahier dans lequel j’ai écrit ‘The notebook in which I wrote’.
It has to be conceded that this campaign had some success. In modern English, constructions like “The world in which we are living” have become rather normal in formal writing. But it has not been very successful in everyday spoken English, where most people still usually use the more natural English form “The world we are living in”.
It is this conflict which has given rise to the strange phenomenon of preposition doubling, where the preposition is both preposed, as in French, and stranded, as in natural English: “The notebook in which I wrote in”.
When speaking in relatively formal styles, and under the influence of misguided notions about linguistic “superiority”, broadcasters (and others) sometimes start off a sentence intending to employ the French-style construction, which does not come naturally to them, but then – without noticing they are doing it – end up also using the syntactic construction which does come naturally to them.
A while ago I submitted a column to this newspaper with the wording: “There are some places in the world which English has spread to…”. By the time it appeared in print, it read: “There are some places in the world to which English has spread…”. Somewhere deep in the bowels of TNE there is someone else who is also suffering from this same linguistic inferiority complex about natural English grammar.
The word brainwashing originally referred to the removal, usually under duress, of established ideas from a person’s mind in order for them to be replaced by other ideas. The term did not appear in written English until
1950, and is thought by some experts to be modelled on Chinese xi nao,
literally ‘wash brain’.