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

[crossword-fiend.livejournal.com]

Totally late to the game, but...

The bright linguists at the blog Language Log are descriptivists, not prescriptivists. I do buy into their approach (and they don't abuse it by running around using "impact" as a verb), which in part says that you can go ahead and end a sentence or clause with a preposition, because (a) people have been doing so in speech and writing for some time, (b) it sounds fine, and (c) the meaning is utterly clear. Look what happened with all your contortions trying to avoid saying, "It squirts water at the person you aim it at." The kids could understand that, no? But all the attempts at reworking things just to avoid saying "at" at the end of the sentence—did those do anything at all to make the communication clearer? The goal should be clarity and communication, not blind adherence to Strunk and White's rules, which they may well have pulled out of their collective a**.