ending sentences with prepositions

A while back I claimed that I thought the rule about not ending sentences with prepositions was stupid. It has always gotten under my skin because the process of working around this "rule" requires using ridiculously awkward sentences. While I obviously still agree with my earlier assessment, I am a bit wiser on the topic now.

A year or two ago I composed my rationale for why having prepositions at the end of a sentence is not a big deal and I sent it to a few coworkers who care about grammar. While I have since found that my below rationalization is not technically accurate, the following are the arguments I put forth.

From my perspective, the acceptable sentence-ending preposition can come in three forms.

Adverb

In this case the purpose of the preposition is to modify a verb, adjective, or noun. For example, in the sentence below "about" modifies "wrote."

"I am interested in the topic you wrote about."

Rewording the sentence could make it more "correct," but it adds no value to the communication of the idea other than forcing the sentence structure to fit better into the Latin mold. It actually makes the sentence quite awkward. The rewrite would probably look like the following.

"I am interest in the topic about which you wrote."

Broken Prepositional Phrase

In this case the prepositional phrase exists, but the preposition comes after the noun. This probably overlaps the other two forms. In the example below "where" is actually part of the prepositional phrase.

"Where do you come from?"

The fix below is just to move the preposition to the beginning of the prepositional phrase. Do you really believe that the following is an improvement?

"From where do you come?"

Implied Prepositional Phase

In this case the purpose can be described as laziness, but that is still an acceptable rationale in English. The following sentence is an example I found online.

"Get in!"

In this case, this is short for "Get in the car!" Something worth noting is that the grammar gods appear to care about the missing (and implied) prepositional phrase a lot more than the missing (and implied) subject. If you are anal about the missing prepositional phrase, why not require that people utter the sentence as follows?

"You, get in the car!"

It is my opinion that the prepositional phrase rule only exists because this is the way we have always done it. This is how Latin is structured, so this is the mold into which we are going to force English. If those who enforce "right" and "wrong" grammar cared more about usability and communication than fitting within the Latin mold, then this rule would not exist.

I recently listened to an old Grammar Girl podcast episode that addressed the issue in much simpler terms. Most of the time that a preposition is placed at the end of a sentence it is part of a verbal phrase and acts as part of the verb in the sentence rather than as a preposition. So, technically the verb is at the end of the sentence in these cases rather than the preposition.

After all of the effort I put into rationalizing why a preposition at the end of a sentence is acceptable, it is a bit deflating to know that I was right for the wrong reasons. I will claim that I was at least close with my noting that the prepositions often function as adverbs, but I still did not get the explanation correct. At least I am assured now that I have it figured out.