I've finally exhumed this book from way too much clutter....

From Amy Einsohn's _The Copyeditor's Handbook_ (Univ. of California Press, 2000): "The American Revolution may have freed the colonies from British rule (and British spelling), but the legacy of post-Elizabethan social and political anxiety is still with us, in the form of, among other niceties, the taboo on ending sentences with prepositions, the turmoil over _less_ and _fewer_, and the injunction against splitting infinitives. For it was Dryden who, in 1672, proclaimed that English sentences were no longer to end with prepositions because Cicero and his brethren did not do so -- and, after all, to have a sentence-ending preposition was to violate the term's etymological soul, which comprises the Latin _prae-_ (in front of, before) and _ponere_ (to put, to place). Henceforth, only a scoundrel would place a preposition anywhere that was not pre."

Referring to the following dicta:

Never begin a sentence with _and_, _but_, _or_, _also_, or _however_;
Never end a sentence with a preposition;
Never split an infinitive; and
Never use _which_ to refer to an entire preceding clause;

Einsohn writes:

"[Y]ou will encounter dozens of 'rules' that were never really rules, just the personal preferences or prejudices of someone bold enough to proclaim them to be rules. Despite what may have been drilled into you (or one of your authors) in high school, all of the [above] taboos are routinely broken (even scoffed at) by well-respected writers and editors and by experts in contemporary American usage."