My thanks to all of you for your suggestions! A few exceptions aside, you've all been very helpful.
It's useful to know formal grammar, even the stuff that you consider overly arbitrary and plain wrong. It's valuable to know how to conform to Strunk & White for those occasions when you're writing for people who value that.
... and what Churchill (may have) thought about avoiding ending sentences with a preposition*.
* "This is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put."
Could you clarify what you mean by this? EoS is a style guide and not a grammar. Some of the "rules" in there can't even be phrased in the terms of grammar (e.g. "Make the paragraph the unit of composition" [didn't check if that's verbatim]).
Indeed, but phrasing it like that would have constituted a failure to make his rhetorical point. Quibbling about the precise role of "up" in this context is no different than quibbling about whether one should end a sentence with a preposition.A more honest (or more grammatically careful) Churhill(?) might have put this as:
This is the type of arrant pedantry with which I will not put up.
That's because most of the people who actually hold to that particular rule would (probably) have called "up" an adverb. There's a straw man in this example. (I, too, call "up" a preposition, but since I didn't formulate that rule, that's quite irrelevant.)
EoS is indeed a style guide and not a grammar; I was using conformance to it and good grammar in parallel, rather than using one as an expansion or appositive to the other. They were both supporting examples for my broader point, which addressed Cliffhanger's: there are linguistic conventions that we follow not because they are correct in the abstract but because it is useful to us to do so in order to reach a particular audience in a particular way.
Indeed, but phrasing it like that would have constituted a failure to make his rhetorical point. Quibbling about the precise role of "up" in this context is no different than quibbling about whether one should end a sentence with a preposition.
His point was that good sense and clear meaning are more important than the pettifogging rules of language. The good sense and clear meaning of his snark caused him to elide a grammatical distinction. Works for me.
no one source is absolute.