Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put / Two Grammar Questions?

Question

In many books I see this (I'm giving you a real example):

"[n]o government can do these things alone", or
"[t]he ballot is both a right and a privilege...[which] must be protected."

Can someone explain why would the author isolate the first letter of the first word (in both examples) using this [ ] sign. It just doesn't make any sense to me.
Or, as is the case in the second example, the whole word [which] has been isolated. Why?

The second query pertains to Sir Churchill's famous quote "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put". Was he serious? Is it allowed in English grammar to change the place of the preposition, and doesn't it render the whole sentence incorrect?

Answer 1

Usually when you see "[ etc., it's because they've summarized then gone into a direct quote, and in so doing needed to make the first letter appropriately capital or lower-case. There might have been a long quote blah blah, but "no govt can do ..." So usually when there's a letter in the brackets, its a capital, not the way you have it.
And the [which] is a pronoun inserted to make a grammatical sentence after the loss of the words indicated by ...
Churchill's quote was a response to a hardnose who insisted that no sentence could ever end with a preposition (which is a general rule that sometimes must be broken). He was making the point that any reasonable English speaker would have said "That is something I will not put up with."

Answer 2

Brackets confuse me as well. I know they are sometimes used to insert a word not in the original text, such as "which" in your example. The author may have used an excerpt from another source and wanted to shorten it to get the main idea across. This sometimes requires editing and the brackets denote this change. "The ballot must be protected" may have been much further in the passage, so instead of quoting the entire passage, the author connected the two points with "which." As for the single letters, I have no idea. I think they are sometimes used when quoting letters and the original writer misspelled a word or left out a word, which happens frequently. Winston Churchill was no doubt being sarcastic. Ending sentences with a preposition, such as "with," is improper English. To avoid committing this error himself, he made his statement rediculous. "Ending a sentence with a preposition is something I will not put up with" makes more sense, but it's improper English. "Ending a sentence in with a preposition is something I will not tolerate" would have been much better if he wanted to be serious. To avoid this error, changing the vocabulary of a sentence the best option. Personally, I've always wondered why authors delete names of people and cities. They prefer to write P------ or Mr. T----- or something of that nature.

Answer 3

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RE:
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put / Two Grammar Questions?
In many books I see this (I'm giving you a real example):

"[n]o government can do these things alone", or
"[t]he ballot is both a right and a privilege...[which] must be protected."

Can someone explain why would the author isolate the first letter of the first word...

Answer 4

The brackets are because they aren't in the original quote. The quote has been changed in some way. At least I know that's the case with [which].
Churchill did say the sentence properly if you go with the rule that you can't end a sentence with a proposition. But that rule comes from Latin where you can't end a sentence with a proposition due the the way Latin is structured. So, yes, he put the prepositions in the correct place even tho that certainly isn't the common usage.

Answer 5

As to the first point, words such as [which] or the initial letters of [n]o and [t]he did appear in exactly that form in the original quotation. I suspect that the original had "No" and "The" rather than "no" and "the," and that [which] replaces a long subject that the writer found too prolix to reproduce.

While most sentences can be rewritten and improved by not ending them in a preposition, Churchill's aphorism was intended to show that his rhetoric would not be bound by that or any other petty restriction.

James Thurber, in an essay entitled, "The Psychosemanticism Will See You Now," cited an exchange he [might have] heard in a Columbus eye hospital, a place to go to "get something in your eye out," to which another replied that you couldn't find a better place "to get something in your eye out in."

The Thurber quote is from memory. I no longer have the book.

Answer 6

1. Original quote started a sentence, is being quotes inside another sentence, so initial capitol letter changed.

2. This rule about not ending with a preposition applies to Latin, but not to English which is a Germanic-based language, and it is OK to end a sentence with a preposition if it sounds better that way.