Monday 22 October 2007

Churchill on editorial nonsense

Washington Post, Sep. 30, 1946, p. 12, "Town Talk," by Eva Hinton

Latest Churchill story going the rounds has to do with a stuffy young Foreign Office secretary who had the job of "vetting" the then Prime Minister's magnificent speeches. The young man disliked the P.M.'s habit of ending sentences with prepositions and corrected such sentences whenever he found them.

Finally, Mr. Churchill had enough of this! So he recorrected his own speech and sent it back to the Foreign Office with a notation in red ink, "This is the kind of pedantic nonsense up with which I will not put!"

Go to source: Language Log: Churchill vs. editorial nonsense

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