Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing cover image

Pedantic Nonsense Up with Which I Will Not Put! 'Discreet' or 'Discrete'?

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

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Particles Don't Pide Pipe

Linguist john robert ross coined the term pied piping in his 19 67 dissertation to refer to the way that english allows prepositions to be moved from the end of a sentence to before the verb. But unlike prepositions, particles don't pide pipe. To see this rule in action, let's go back to our example with take and a direct object, in a particle, the student took the idea in. If we phrased it as a question, we could say, which idea did the student take? Both of those are fine, but if we try to pieto pipe the in, we quickly run into trouble. That doesn't make sense at

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