To really get things started right, I'm adding a bonus round to this quiz. I was thinking about the famous quote about the rule against ending sentences with prepositions, generally attributed to Churchill: “This is the sort of (English | bloody nonsense | arrant pedantry) up with which I will not put!” As I thought about it, I realized that it is not only awkward, but grammatically incorrect as well. What is the error?
Well, I can't resist your language quizzes, so should it say "with which I will not put up?"
Nope, it's more fundamental than the word order.
"SHALL"?!?!?!?! Right? Right?
Hmm... perhaps, but that's not what I had in mind.
Oh, you're just making this up!
What I was looking for was the incorrect use of ‘which’, which adds suplementary information. ‘That’ is the word that specifies what the part before refers to. (Take everything from ‘which’ onward away from the first sentence in this paragraph, and everything from ‘that’ onward from the second, and only one still makes sense).
So it should presumably be: ‘This is the sort of English that up with I will not put!’
I must humbly beg to disagree. I think the "up" confuses things. Trying sentences that don't sound like they have an extra preposition (tho UP is an adverb here I guess),I've never heard "that" used this way. The party to that I came? The stairs over that I stumbled? The grammar over that we confuse ourselves?
Ah, the rule as I learned it was oversimplified, apparently—or at least over-strict. The usage note at dictionary.com says:
"Some grammarians extend the rule and insist that, just as that should be used only in restrictive clauses, which should be used only in nonrestrictive clauses. [...] But this extension of the rule is far from universally accepted, and the use of which with restrictive clauses is common. Furthermore, [...] that cannot be used with clauses introduced by a preposition (whether or not restrictive)"
- dictionary.com
And for more depth, The King's English.
So double points for Carolyn, and a round in the penalty box for me for giving a bad answer. Although in my defense, *I* wasn't making it up :)