viveca- excellent! I love the story behind that remark, although it is probably wrongly attributed. ah well. winston churchill and beavis and butthead, excellent combination :)

Robert Lowth was an eighteenth century clergyman and Oxford professor of poetry who published a work entitled "a short introduction to english grammar" and it was in this piece that he invented the rule concerning ending sentences with prepositions. He said that it was unacceptable in formal writing because it was against the rules in Latin. Thanks to this kind invention, decades of English speaking schoolchildren have been syntactically warped as his book became the standard textbook for grammar teaching until well into the twentieth century. brilliant.