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OT: Who said it?



Harry Binswanger wrote:
Puts me in mind of GBS's response to a letter that said, "Here is
> something out of which I hope you will get a kick."
GBS: "That sentence has the kind of foolishness up with
> which I shall not put."
First of all, would anyone of GBS's vintage have used the expression "get a kick out of something"? The OED supplement records the first citation for that phrase in 1928, so it's possible, but...
More important, this tale is usually told of Winston
Churchill: My Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
(3d ed., 1979) lists it under his name thus, "This is
the sort of English up with which I will not put"
Attrib. comment against clumsy avoidance of a
preposition at the end of a sentence. E. Gowers,
Plain Words...
Of course, in neither example is there really a
preposition involved. "To get a kick out of" something
and "to put up with" something are phrasal verbs; the
"out of" and "up with" are more like separable prefixes
in German than real prepositions.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx