(note–this is an old thread that just got bumped, but it’s still an interesting conversation).
Help me out: is it true that every preposition must be able to take a simple noun as its object? When I was a kid, the list of prepositions I learned followed that rule. “While” doesn’t: you can’t say, “She wept while the movie.”
I’ve never heard of this reclassification of conjunctions as prepositions. Does anyone have a cite for this?