Happy Endings
By Angela Arlia

aaaahere you at?"
aaaaSitting on the bus and overhearing this important question from a teenager on a cell phone a few days ago, I began to imagine the sound of crushing steel from a 10-car pile up. It residually felt like someone giving me a spinal tap but it soon resolved itself.
aaaaI have not been able to figure out why we have this need, especially those of the younger generation, to use prepositions at the ends of questions and sentences, or when they really aren't necessary. I was raised in the grammatical school of thought that you should try to avoid using prepositions at the end of phrases. aaaaApparently this school is on the demise because I always hear prepositions flying around in conversations when they shouldn't be there. And I must admit, this use is bringing me closer and closer to an early death, but that is neither here nor there.
aaaaLet's look at this lovely tidbit of a phrase in quotation marks above, shall we? I understand what it's asking. But wouldn't it sound better and more appropriate to just ask your friend, "Where are you?" I think it accomplishes the same purpose, that of learning the location of the person to whom you are talking. (And notice that I didn't say "the person you are talking to"-because that would have left the preposition "to" dangling at the end of the sentence.) Doesn't that sound better? Doesn't it avoid the nails-against-the-chalkboard effect of the other version? I think so.
aaaaAnother fun phrase ending in a preposition that I've heard often is, "Where you going to?" Ohhhh, how I love that one-probably as much as I love having bamboo shoots rammed into my nail beds. It suffices to just ask the question without the preposition. The interrogator will still get the destination of the respondent.
One of the stickier prepositions is "for". A lot of times we use it and it sounds ok, so we assume it is. One example is the famous parental, "What did you do that for?" It's still not correct but we are so used to hearing it that we think it is. I've found that the problem with this biting-on-aluminum-foil error can easily be fixed by just changing the question word from "what" to "why". Now, I think it sounds better (and is actually grammatically correct) to say, "Why did you do that?" and hope that a better answer comes your way than the usual "I don't know" response that comes from the other, incorrect, prepositional-ending phrase. Perhaps it could be a move towards a more responsible reply if we all started asking "why" instead of ''what".
aaaaLet's take a look at prepositions and see if we can't get rid of some of these spinal tap-simulating errors.
aaaaThere is one very simple rule with prepositions: A preposition is followed by a noun. It is never followed by a verb.
aaaaIn the category of "noun" we include:

• noun (dog, money, love)
• proper noun (name) (Bangkok, Mary)
• pronoun (you, him, us)
• noun group (my first job)
• gerund (swimming)

aaaaA preposition cannot be followed by a verb. If we want to follow a preposition with a verb, we must use the "-ing" form of the verb, which is called a gerund, meaning a verb in noun form.
aaaaSo what the heck does all this mean? It means you can't just leave a preposition hanging in mid-air as it does in those joyful examples I mentioned earlier in this article. It means you either drop the preposition from the end of the sentence entirely, or you use a noun. (For heaven's sake if you are going to learn one thing in this article it had better be: Don't use a preposition to end a phrase!)
aaaaBelow are some examples of successful prepositional usage:

aaaaWhere is the food? (Not "Where is the food at?") The food is in my stomach.
aaaaWhat is she doing? She is looking for you.
aaaaWhere does she live? She lives in Lalaland.
aaaaWhat are you used to doing? (Not "What are you used to?") I am used to working.

aaaaAll the words in bold print are either nouns or a gerund. Now if you say those examples out loud, doesn't it sound like a crisp, fresh, spring morning with birds chirping in the background? I think so. I'll take that over spinal taps or nails on the chalkboard any day.