And don't start sentences with conjunctions

John Rosenberg was canny enough to end a posting with this sentence:

A commenter astutely riposted, "That, sir, is the sort of errant pedantry up with which I will not put."

Now I said all that to say all this: Once upon a time, Games magazine, taking note of the "prepositions are inappropriate words to end sentences with" rule, held a competition to see if anyone could stack two, even three of the pesky little words at the end of a sentence.

Certain liberties were taken with the definition of "preposition", I think — some of these look suspiciously adverbial to me — but the winner managed a string of five. It requires some setup, of course.

Child sleeps upstairs; family library is downstairs. Parental unit brings up a storybook; child rejects it, complaining, "What did you bring that book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?"

This is, I believe, up there with the old saw about how two negatives make a positive, but two positives will never make a negative.

Yeah, right.