Here’s a poem for you by Morris Bishop entitled “To and Fro”:
I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, “Perdition!
Up from out of under there.”
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, “What should he come
Up from out of under for?”
Wow, six prepositions in a row! That has to be something of a record.
i wonder if he knew Ogden Nash or Bennett Cerf? more on him at Wiki… i just ordered “A Gallery of Eccentrics”… tx, i luv this stuff…
Cute – I’ll be Winston Churchill would have enjoyed it. I believe he is the one that said in reference to not ending sentences with a preposition something like it’s something ‘up with which I will not put.’ Tongue in cheek probably as I seem to recall he thought it a silly rule.
It’s a rule I violate daily.