I’ll get us started: What’s wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition?
It’s not something we do here at Hah-vahrd.
Adam
Indeed? What about these words from your president
(From second paragraph of this)
Not only a preposition at the end of the sentence, but also a conjunction at the start!
Traditionally, the rule against ending sentences with prepositions is a special, though common, case of a more general rule against separating a preposition from its object. I think the idea is that the preposition-object pair is something that if separated will make the sentence less clear. Nowadays I don’t think it’s really a rule so much as it is a guideline that writers should be aware of, should they choose to break it.
Ending a sentence with a preposition would be very bad. Ending a sentence with a phrasal verb is perfectly acceptable.
Whoosh. 
In English, nothing. It was an attempt to force fit English into a Latin sentence structure. Same with split infinitives. A Latin infinitve is one word, which cannot be split. English, which is much less inflected than Latin, has its own rules and needn’t copy that dead language. In fact, that is something up with which we should not put.
This is an rule of Latin grammar which was artificially introduced to English by Dryden. We might as well get “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put” out of the way, and continue our regular worship of Fowler.
Some examples from This page:
[ul]
[li]He’s a man you shouldn’t trifle with. (…with whom you shouldn’t trifle.)[/li][li]They got more than they bargained for. (They got more than that for which they bargained.)[/li][li]Guess who I bumped into. (Guess into whom I bumped.)[/li][li]He’s someone you can count on. (…on whom you can count.)[/li]It’s an opportunity I’d leap at. (…at which I’d leap.)[/ul]
And while we’re at it, let’s just dump “whom” altogether. Most people don’t know how to use it “correctly”, and it almost never needed.
Who will you be going with? With whom will you be going? Same diff.
“Whom” should only be used if you are a English Butler. 
Back to the OP. There are no rules, so there’s nothing to debate.
There are various prescriptive guides, all of whom are full of shit to some degree. These are not "rules’ to anyone unless your employer tells you to follow said "guide’. “The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage : The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World’s Most Authoritative Newspaper” is one such. Fine- if you work for the NY times. Otherwise, not "rules’ at all.
Then there are usage guides, which follow how grammar is used. Oxford is such a usage guide. There are no "rules’ here, just examples of how Grammar is commonly used. I like these sort’s of book’s as they usually don’t try to prohibit thing’s which infuriate “Grammar nazi’s” - such as “wrong” usage of apostrophe’s.
really? This you to proper sentence sounds is to, does?
English does have rules. One of which handles the order in which words appear. It’s actually kind of hard to come up with an ungrammatical sentence for an English speaker (I can do it much more easily in Spanish, since no fluentio Espanolio soy mio), since we know the rules so firmly.
Some example English words:
-Adjectives almost always appear just before the noun they modify.
-When you’re pluralizing a noun you’ve not encountered before, you–well try it. If there’s a blarg in your hand, and I put another blarg in your hand, what are you holding?
-John likes to schmeekle. In fact, that’s what he’s doing right now. What is he doing? (The way you formed the present progressive of schmeekle demonstrates your knowledge of the rule in English about forming present progressives–this is a rule without an exception, AFAIK).
Daniel
I’ll also add that while the rules of spoken English are learned pretty fluently by most kids raised in English-speaking households by the age of about five, the rules of written English are much more arbitrary and, almost paradoxically, therefore much more worth knowing. The rules about separating sentences with periods, separating words with spaces, and separating paragraphs with line breaks make reading written text far, far easier. Proper spelling makes the written language more transparent, so the reader expends less mental attention on deciphering your words and has more attention to expend on understanding and evaluating your meaning. Proper use of commas can eliminate ambiguity, increasing the likelihood that you communicate your meaning accurately.
From my perspective, it’s all about what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re trying to write a screed whose purpose is primarily to blow off steam, then we evaluate it by how much steam you blew off: if you’re still angry at the end of the screed, no matter how beautifully you used commas, you still failed. If, however, you’re trying to write a persuasive essay, and the reader ends up unpersuaded because she’s so irritated at your arbitrary punctuation, then no matter how much steam you blew off in writing the essay, you failed at what you were trying to accomplish.
Daniel
I’ve heard the rule “never end a sentence with a preposition,” but it’s not something I was ever taught (even back in the dark ages of the 1970’s). Rather, I was taught to check if prepositions were neccessary. For example, you don’t need the preposition in a sentence like “Where’s the dog at?” You do in a sentence like “That’s a dog you can depend on.”
Even if you don’t “need” the preposition, I don’t see it as problematic in “where’s the dog at?” It may be redundant, but our language is full of redundancies. Often, redundancies clarify meaning and make it less likely that a typo or a verbal hiccup (a miscue) will change the meaning drastically. For example, in a language based around efficiency, there would be no reason to change a verb in the third-person singular: the subject of the verb already indicates that it’s in the third person singular. Compare “The dog sits on the alpaca,” a redundant construction, to “The dog sit on the alpaca,” an efficient construction. Efficiency suggests the latter form. However, say the latter form out loud: the listener can’t tell whether there’s one dog or forty on the poor alpaca’s back. The redundant change in verb conjugation gives the audience an extra chance to comprehend meaning.
Daniel
There are no rules if you don’t care about being understood. If you do care, then there are rules. One is that the object of the sentence must follow an active verb:
Bush beat Kerry.
Kerry beat Bush.
Two sentences with very different meanings, and two very different implications for the American people, I might add.
In the past tense, you would have “The dog sat on the alpaca” and “The dogs sat on the alpaca.” Ambiguity in spoken English? I don’t think so, because I believe there’s a difference between one and two “s” sounds there.
In any case, “dogs” leaves in unclear whether there are two or forty dogs – but if it matters, then you specify (just as you do for nouns that are the same in the singular and plural, like “deer” and “sheep”).
Let me contribute my thoughts. There is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition, or beginning a sentence with “and” or “but” or splitting an infinitive. Those, however, are isolated cases. The linguistic anarchists who claim to be valiantly defending us from “grammar Nazis” always bring up those three issues, which some people incorrectly believe to be rules for proper English. Those are unique cases wherein some wrongheaded attempt at creating a rule went too far and muddied the waters of proper English usage. But they are exceptions, not representative examples of English language rules.
The English language does have rules. It has many rules. That much is beyond dispute. Suppose I say “Elephant that hybrid crank jaunt yearning beyond.” I used only English-language words, but I used those words without paying attention to the rules of the English language. Consequently, I failed to communicate any thought to any other person.
If we wish to communicate with each other, then clearly we must recognize that the English language has rules. These rules are standardized in numerous texts and agreed upon by hundreds of millions of speakers. True, the standardized texts may disagree on a handful of very minor points, but they agree on all the major rules.
Having come to that realization, there is nothing left to debate regarding “the rules of grammar and usage”. The rules are the rules, and they are not open for debate. I am not saying that the rules of the English language are perfect, or that they are good, logical or practical. I am merely saying that they are the rules, and that if we fail to follow them then, then our ability to communicate will be reduced. There is a rule that tells us when to use “who” and when to use “whom”, and there is no reason to not obey that rule. (Certainly we shouldn’t run away from “whom” because using that word properly is too hard; if you know “he” from “him” , then you also know “who” from “whom”.)
For anyone who wishes to see this line of reasoning presently more clearly, I recommend following this link.
ITR: I sort of agree with you, although I can’t buy in fully. Grammar rules change over time, and there has to be a debate at least at the margins. Why, for instance, we no longer distinguish between the nominative 2nd person singular and plural forms. When did “you” replace “ye” in the plural form, and how did that become OK? I’m sure there was a time when using “you” instead of “ye” was just as wrong as using “who” instead of “whom”.
By this point, someone is probably getting ready to mock the errors in my last post. Perhaps they’ve started already. I’ll issue a preemptive strike against that snarky reply. This message board has some odd qualities, including the quality that it eats up posts when the author spends too much time previewing, proofreading and editing. Consequently, I often post without proofreading. That fact does not affect the debate over whether rules of grammar and usage exist. It doesn’t even make “who” superior to “whom”. Sorry.
There are two basic responses to the argument that rules must change over time. The first is that poast rules changes occured in the era prior to standardization. Prior to the twentieth century, there were no universal dictionaries or usage manuals. There was a lot more variation from one region to the next. Now we have standardization, and authoritative guides to explain the rules. I believe that “you” went to “ye” before Fowler or any of his peers attempted to codify the rules of English.
So has change come to any utter standstill? Certainly not. Plainly there are minor differences between modern usage and 1920’s usage. However, the more we stick to the standardized rules, the more clarity we get in our communication. Accept too much change and we lose the ability to read older texts. We eventually lose some of our ability to communicate with each other. This is especially true when we encounter proposed changes that are, by reasonable standards, particularly anarchic . For instance, many members of my generation apparently believe that the ellipsis is an all-purpose punctuation mark. You know the type: “hey…what’s up…how u doing…” Plainly this makes for prose that’s more difficult to read and introduces lots of ambiguity. Things like that transformed me from a linguistic moderate into a stickler.
As I’ve said in previous threads on this topic, it’s not a trivial issue. Any individual change may be trivial, but when you add up a lot of them you get serious problems. I do a lot of volunteer work with kids in the middle-school age range in inner-city Nashville. Many of them simply haven’t been taught enough English to clearly say what they mean, and I frequently don’t understand them and they don’t understand me. For instance, they never learned the difference between “got” and “have”. They may say: “I got a book.” This indicates current possession of the book, which is what I would mean if I said: “I have a book.” In the long run, this will have a very negative effect on these kids’ prospects if they want to get a college education and a middle-class job.