As our beloved written and spoken languages evolve and become – dare I say it – a little more relaxed, we don’t seem to mind committing the formerly heinous crime of ending a sentence with a preposition. Back in the day – which itself is an odd idiomatic phrase – people used to get pretty worked up about grammar and syntax.
This was the one rule which caused the well known Churchillian reaction: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”
They say that language neither progresses nor decays, it simply changes. Whatever it does, I think it serves us all better to be more flexible and less rigid. A great example of this is in poetry and songs, where ending a line with a preposition can help the writer out and make the line scan more elegantly. Who could forget the famous double preposition of Wings’ Live and Let Die: “…this world in which we live in…”?
More recently, but already a classic, is the Jay Z and Alicia Keys song Empire State of Mind with its line “concrete jungle where dreams are made of”.
Prepositions are handy little nodes connecting elements of a sentence together, so let’s continue to allow them to roam free, for which our language will be the better :-).
Paul Dilger's blog 
“…in this ever changing world in which we live in…”?
I know this is what the internet days, but I’d always assumed that was a misunderstanding, and that McCartney would have more likely written:
“…in this ever changing world in which we’re livin’…”.
No?
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But Yes, I wince at the Concrete Jungle line too. Every time.
But is actually wrong?
If you can say “[item]: it’s what dreams are made of” why can’t you say
“[Place]: it’s where dreams are made of” rather than where they are made?
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Andy, thanks for your comments. Your alternative Wings lyric is very plausible :-). As to the concrete jungle line, surely it’s made of something rather than made of somewhere, so either you say CG where dreams are made, or CG that dreams are made of? They’re just filling out the line, right, taking poetic license?
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