Churchill & prepositions (redux)

[Ben Zimmer]

I've been testing out <http://www.newspaperarchive.com/>, a searchable
database of about 400 newspapers (contributors to the American Dialect
Society listserv have been using it a lot lately). It's a pay service,
but they're currently offering a two-day free trial registration. I
thought I'd try out one of our old favorites:

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxprepos.html
Winston Churchill was editing a proof of one of his books, when
he noticed that an editor had clumsily rearranged one of
Churchill's sentences so that it wouldn't end with a preposition.
Churchill scribbled in the margin, "This is the sort of English up
with which I will not put." (This is often quoted with "arrant
nonsense" substituted for "English", or with other variations. The
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations cites Sir Ernest Gowers' _Plain
Words_ (1948), where the anecdote begins, "It is said that
Churchill..."; so we don't know exactly what Churchill wrote.
According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language,
Churchill's words were "bloody nonsense" and the variants are
euphemisms.)

Previously I had discovered that the anecdote was circulating as early
as 1942 but without the attribution to Churchill. Then in 1948, the
story became firmly attached to Churchill by Gowers and others (see:
<http://groups.google.com/groups?th=33cd970340253e96>). On the
newspaperarchive.com site, I found another 1948 citation that may
explain how the story first came to be associated with Churchill:

'Up With Which I Will Not Put' Is Latest Winston Churchillism
Portland Press Herald (Portland, Maine), March 20, 1948
London March 19 (UP) -- Another Churchillism has been read into
the record -- "up with which I will not put."
Thursday night in the House of Commons, Glenvil Hall, financial
secretary to the treasury, made a plea for clearer English. He
cited as an example of Winston Churchill's "forceful if not
always grammatical English" this marginal notation that the
wartime Prime Minister scribbled on a document: "This is
nonsense up with which I will not put."

This same wire story appeared later in March '48 in another newspaper,
the Daily Gleaner of Kingston, Jamaica (!), so clearly the anecdote was
traveling far and wide.

The next step would be to track down exactly what Glenvil Hall said in
the House of Commons archives. I'm guessing he embellished the story
along the lines of later versions, wherein Churchill is chastising an
officious Foreign Office clerk or book editor.