Preposition trouble

[rhu]

Over lunch with the kids, I was explaining how a "squirt dolphin" works. (It's a water pistol for parents who don't want to encourage gunplay.) I said:

It squirts water at whomever you aim it...

and then I froze. My pending-preposition-reference-count was non-zero and urged me to say "at," but my don't-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition hemisphere said, "uh-uh, the place for that 'at' was four words ago." So I tried again:

It squirts water at at...

Ugh! I stopped right there. This isn't an ack-ack or an atlatl, it's an English sentence.

Forgetting about awkwardness, the grammatically correct structure would be

It squirts water at at whomever you aim it.

introverte says the second "at" should be elided and my original sentence, where I stopped it, would have been fine. This is clearly a problem only because both prepositions are the word "at". Compare:

It steals bananas from at whomever you aim it.
It squirts water at from whom you've stolen bananas.

So, ok, I recast the sentence completely:

It squirts water at the person at whom it's aimed.

and since I feel the passive voice is too often maligned, I'm satisified with this sentence --- but I still want to know if there's a deeper reason that "at at" feels wrong.

(WedNYT 7:08)

Comments

[michelel72.livejournal.com]

I'm intrigued that you skipped straight over
It squirts water at the person at whom you aim it.
You were originally working in the second person, so the switch into passive voice doesn't seem necessary.

("[...] the passive voice is [...] maligned." Nice!)

Both banana examples sound not right to me, though. In my non-technical analysis, I think I'm not accustomed to seeing prepositions take prepositional phrases as objects.

Put another way, if you structure the sentence "incorrectly" so that it ends with the second preposition, both prepositions appear to "own" the same object (person) but the displacement makes that less obvious. Once you move both prepositions together, you seem to be missing an object -- at least as I read the sentence, because I expect both prepositions to take the noun as the object.

Keep in mind, though, that I find the "don't end with a preposition!" rule itself artificial and arbitrary. Many English-language verb phrases include terminal prepositions (such as Churchill's put up with example); even when that's not a factor, so long as all required elements are present, I see nothing worse about a terminal preposition than I do with the language's atypical do-query structure.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

I'm not accustomed to seeing prepositions take prepositional phrases as objects.

I like this explanation.