WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Once I lost a preposition.
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily, I cried, "Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!"
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And dangling phrases I abhor.
But still I wonder, what should he come
Up from out of in under for?
-Morris Bishop, American linguist, The New Yorker, 1947
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily, I cried, "Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!"
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And dangling phrases I abhor.
But still I wonder, what should he come
Up from out of in under for?
-Morris Bishop, American linguist, The New Yorker, 1947