It all depends

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams

And so much depends upon the right preposition matched with its object beside the verb.

Prepositions are the little – and very tricky – words that define the relation between the parts of a sentence, and there is a huge difference between thinking up a solution or thinking about one, between talking about one’s neighbor and talking with him.

In itself, a word like about or up is rather meaningless, but combined with other words prepositions help determine when or where or under what conditions something happened. And yet, they are such mischievous troublemakers. Why do we have dinner at our house but prepare it in the kitchen? Why is he under stress and she is at ease? Trusting our ears will not always yield the correct result as the following sentences, all taken from major newspapers, illustrate.

Union membership for men dropped 11.4%. While the membership fee for a certain group may drop, membership among men has dropped.

Mrs. Name concurred in this sit-tight strategy. In fact, she concurred with it, which is just another way to say, she agreed with it.

Warner Bros. romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" seduced an estimated $10.4 million from about 4,400 screens in 58 markets. The comedy may have seduced movie goers in 58 markets to spend $10.4 million. It certainly didn’t seduce any money from screens.

Max wrote about his lifelong embarrassment of his brother Nat. Max probably wrote about his embarrassment at this brother’s behavior or that Nat’s behavior was an embarrassment to him.

A movement of Mahler would indicate that a certain person by the name of Mahler made a particular move. Yet, the author wrote about Gustav Mahler’s symphonies and thus about a movement by Mahler.

The odds are definitely against any odds for promotion but very strongly in favor of the odds of being promoted; and someone who finds himself in such an auspicious situation should not be frugal about asking his boss for a raise but simply be frugal and not ask for a 20% increase.

A perfect face-lift shall ensure that someone will never suffer through an overarched eyebrow. This sentence raises eyebrows because it is an example of placing a preposition where in fact none is needed.

The person who suffers such damaging plastic surgery then may need some pampering and decide to stow away to her favorite spa. Nothing against some pampering, but at her favorite spa.

High school’s last year didn’t yield anything other than to make one an unwed mother and a couple of them into victims of major car collisions. Why should the same situation make "one a mother" and "others into victims"? The preposition into is as much a surplus as is – in the author’s opinion – twelfth grade.

Some politicians claim that health care reform would be a great help towards struggling families. Others believe that they should rethink the whole plan and start over from a clean sheet of paper. Let’s start over with a clean sheet and make sure that the plan will be of help to families.

The crucial question is whether we know of prepositions or know something about them. When in doubt, a good dictionary will provide the correct answer.

Here is a good list of words that require particular prepositions.

State of the preposition

Ray: Reading all those sports books and watching those sports on TV, that's how I got to be where I'm at.
Marie: (long pause) "That's how I got to be where I'm at?"
Ray: Yeah.
Marie: You're a writer, and that's how you use the English language?
Ray: Yeah, what? What did I do?
Marie: You never end a sentence with the word "at!"
Ray: Okay, okay. Big deal, so I ended a sentence with a proposition.
Marie: Preposition! It's a pre-position--oh my God! Where did I go wrong? (Everybody Loves Raymond, “Homework”)

Reading a sentence that ends with a preposition turns me off. With a good thesaurus, such stylistic slips are easily got rid off. What really puts me off, however, is the expanding cackotopia under its emperor The Preposition with its proliferation of off-the-cuff word mongering dross that is really getting out of hand.
What, for example, shall I make of the advice that I, too, should input (or output?) product reviews and “throw in with the reviewers of Vulli Sophie, the Giraffe Teether”? Shall I throw my review in the internet like a soccer player the ball after it has gone over the sideline? Or am I clued in on throwing in my lot with other reviewers and try to get across what I think of a certain product by putting in my own two cents worth? Whether writing online product reviews makes me a member of a new literary movement or not, dishing out such advice did not bring out the poetry in the writer. It didn’t even bring out the poet in him.
I also get worked up over splitting phrasal verbs (verbs that consist of a verb plus a preposition which changes the verb’s original meaning, such as pick versus pick at, or pick on, or pick off, or pick out, or pick over, or pick through, or – yes – pick up). The rules of language call for saying, “he picked up the parcel” and not “he picked the parcel up.” Out of out-and-out meanness, however, not every verb coming with a preposition in its tow is a phrasal verb, and not every preposition necessarily hangs on to the verb like a barnacle. So, talking about a guy who used “a toothbrush sharpened to a point to stab in the neck a man who threatened him” is totally off-the-wall.
Was it this stabbed in the neck man who had to put up with medical residents putting a catheter into his body but forgetting to put on face shields and caps? The doctor who had to keep his eye on them passed over their negligence because he wanted to get the procedure over with as quickly as possible and get out of there. His patient probably is not letting this go by. Based off of such experience, he might very well go after the doctor and his malpractice. After all, even a stabbed in the neck patient knows "that only to those who have been loyal to him, he has to be loyal back to" (Charlie Crist, Florida Governor). The doctor better put himself on a healthy diet of denial right away, something some doctors are really good at.



Most prepositions in the text above can be eliminated by choosing a more precise verb or adjective:
annoys me, avoided, riles me, with its uncontrolled proliferation, lackadaisical, how shall I interpret, post, advised to join, convey, how I assess, adding my inconsequential opinion, bestowing, awaken, irritated, mandates, downright, verb followed by a preposition, clings to, invoking, to stab a man who threatened him in the neck, nonsensical, endure, inserting, wear, observe/supervise, disregarded, finish the procedure, leave, pass, based on, sue him for malpractice, only to those who have been loyal to him, he has to be loyal too, prescribe himself a healthy diet, master only too well.

Yet, absolutely ludicrous would be a writer on whom it piles (instead of "who piles it on"). It would quickly turn into double-Dutch if we refrained from ending a sentence with a preposition just because somebody "once had a boss who wouldn't allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning" (Bill Bryson, the mother tongue 143).
In fact, even Robert Lowth, an influential eighteenth century grammarian simply believed that prepositions, words that define the relationship between other words mostly regarding time, space or position, should be placed before (pre) their relatives. He considered this a matter of style not a rigid rule. In a similar vein, George Benjamin Wood's 1922 Writer’s Handbook maintains that “it is not incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition although, as a general rule, it is best not to do so.” Sometimes ending a sentence with a preposition may be even more effective because “the stress [thus falls] upon the word preceding the preposition” (104) such as in “You have to remember where he is coming from.”
It is, however, not very convincing to suggest that a sentence like, “This is a matter I would urge you to make your own decision on” should be revised as “This is a matter on which I would urge you to make your own decision.” Much better would be, “I urge you to make your own decision on this matter,” a sentence that follows the basic structure of Subject – Verb – Object.
S – V – O is one of the most common orders found in the world, suggesting that it may be somehow more initially 'obvious' to human psychology (Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee 143). It makes sense that we first want to know who or what (subject) is doing something, then what (verb) this entity is doing, before we bother to wonder whom (object) this action may affect.
An equally common sentence structure, however, is Subject – Object – Verb. About the downside of this configuration Mark Twain observed that when, for instance, “the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth” (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, an awfully funny read), and this is “awful undermining to the intellect, German is” (A Tramp Abroad).