A lot of folks here say that you can't end a sentence with a preposition.?

Question

Why do we have that rule? For those of you who say we can't end a sentence with a preposition, would you actually say these questions to your friends?

At what are you looking?
For what did you do that?
In which door did you go?
On which clothes will you put?

Answer 1

The prohibition against putting a preposition at the end of a sentence, also known as "preposition stranding", was invented during the 1700s, probably by Robert Lowth, who is a famous grammarian of that time. Lowth, and others like him, wanted English to be more like Latin, and so made rules accordingly. In Latin, you would always move the preposition to the front of a question like the ones you have written. However, Lowth and his colleagues ignored the fact that English is not Latin, but rather a Germanic language. In fact, if you think about it, the choice was rather arbitrary, since they just as easy could have told us all to always strand prepositions. English speakers everywhere just continued what they had been doing for hundreds of years already: stranding them when they wanted to, and have continued doing so to the present. In fact, the non-stranded version quite often sounds odd, as you've demonstrated with your examples. That's why Winston Churchill, when criticized for stranding a preposition, joked that it was something "up with which we should not put".

Answer 2

drshorty covered it nicely (no surprise there), but one littel aside:

The humorous quip that she cited, so often attributed to Churchill, is something he almost certainly did NOT say --or at least did not originate. It was, rather, the work of an editor at the Strand magazine, in 1942 or earlier. Only after World War II did was it attributed to Churchill, a frequent contributor to the magazine.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001715.html
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill#Disputed_quotations

Some who have studied the history of the citation suggest that Churchill DID pick up and adapt the quote himself, in about 1944.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002670.html

And if you really get into the discussion, here's an argument that the quip, while entertatining, doesn't really illustrate the point it's supposed to anyway! (by Geoffrey K. Pullum, author of the marvelous essay "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax". . . by the way, he agrees that the rule against final prepositions is absurd)

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001702.html

Answer 3

Who said that one can´t end a sentence with a preposition? In my mother tongue (Spanish) one can´t indeed, but in English, i ve always learned that sentences like those examples you gave, are always written with the preposition at last.
What is that rule ABOUT??

Answer 4

whew! pretty stuffy answers so far. no doubt wannabe teachers...the short answer is "dangling participle" i.e. where's she at? casually speaking it's fine, formally, no.