This is a point over which people still fight.

Prepositions are usually placed in front of the nouns and pronouns they link to the rest of a sentence (such as beyond hope, with ice-cream, and over my dead body.) But they don't have to have words tacked behind them.

The myth that ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong appears to have started with an influential book by an eighteenth-century Bishop of London, Robert Lowth, according to Bill Bryson's The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words. In Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar, the "gentleman grammarian" urged his readers to be polite by avoiding prepositions at the end of their sentences if they possibly could. To Lowth, for example, writing "this is something you should go to" was less appealing than "this is something to which you should go."

"Too many people took him too literally and for a century and a half the notion held sway," Bryson says. "Today, happily, it is universally condemned as a ridiculous affectation."

Novelist Kingsley Amis is a bit harsher, calling the rule "one of those fancied prohibitions dear to ignorant slobs."

If you believe a sentence looks or sounds better with a preposition at the end, write it that way. Grammarians won't quarrel. In fact many will applaud.

Not only is it harmless to put a preposition at the end, it's also natural — an important consideration for writers at the CBC who have their words read aloud on radio and television. Consider the following sentences:

"She refused to come in."

"What's the world coming to?"

And, of course: "This is a point people still fight over."