Basic Trope: Somebody believes it's incorrect to end a sentence with a "preposition" — a word such as "with", "to", "on", "off", etc.
- Straight: Alice asks Bob, "Who are you planning to give the cake to?" Bob replies by asking Alice to rephrase her question so it doesn't end in a preposition.
- Exaggerated: There's an academic town where it's illegal to end a sentence with a preposition.
- Downplayed: Alice asks Bob, "Who are you planning to give the cake to?", and Bob legitimately wonders if ending it in a preposition is OK.
- Justified: Bob is a Grammar Nazi who wants to apply Latin grammar rules to English.
- Inverted: Alice asks Bob, "To whom are you planning to give the cake?" Bob tells her not to be so formal and just say, "Who are you planning to give the cake to?"
- Subverted: Alice asks Bob, "Who are you planning to give the cake to?", then remembers some people don't like this practice and braces herself in case he's one of them. He just says, "It's a secret and I can't tell you."
- Double Subverted:
- While Bob doesn't object to terminal prepositions, Alice happened to say it in earshot of Carol, who does.
- Alice then says, "Okay, and it's nice to not be yelled at for ending a sentence with a preposition" — which does inadvertently press Bob's grammar-related Berserk Button, split infinitives.
- Alternatively, when Alice says it's nice not to be corrected, she makes Bob remember the putative rule against ending sentences with prepositions and he corrects her on that problem ... or both.
- Parodied: Bob says the trope title.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice and Bob argue over whether ending a sentence with a preposition is acceptable or not.
- Averted: Alice asks Bob, "Who are you planning to give the cake to?", and Bob simply replies, "Charlie."
- Enforced: This was one of the few kinds of arguments that could replace the untranslatable argument from the original dub.
- Lampshaded: "Actually, that's false — ending a sentence with a preposition is bad grammar in Latin, but not in English."
- Invoked:
- Exploited: Bob's plans with the cake are secret, so he uses Alice's preposition at the end of her sentence to distract her.
- Defied:
- Bob quickly looks it up to see if it is indeed grammatically incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition before saying anything back to Alice.
- Bob doesn't want to tell Alice not to end her sentence with a preposition, because he's afraid she'll reply in a mean way (e.g., "Who are you planning to give the cake to, jerk?").
- Discussed: "Is ending a sentence with a preposition allowed?"
- Conversed: "Every fictional grammar nut thinks it's grammatically incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition, but that's not actually true."
- Implied:
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice asks Bob, "Who are you planning to give the cake to?". Bob tells her not to end a sentence with a preposition, and she replies, "Who are you planning to give the cake to, jerk?"
- Alice asks Bob, "Who are you planning to give the cake to?" Bob tells her not to end a sentence with a preposition, then Diane, who is only six, tells him that that's only a hard-and-fast rule in Latin, not English. Bob feels embarrassed that a six-year-old knew something he didn't.
- Played for Drama:
- Played for Horror: Bob, a demon, uses supernatural means to punish Alice for ending her sentence with a preposition.
Back to Prepositions Are Not to End Sentences With.
