a distinguished, albeit beardless Winston Churchill
We should all be pretty clear on the basic composition of beard oils by now. You’ve got your base, or carrier, oils, which include the likes of jojoba, argan, coconut, almond or hazelnut oils, and then you’ve got your essential oils, which give your base oil the scent that will linger on your whiskers, or rather will offer the scent that will be carried by your carrier oil, and these include any number of much more heavily concentrated oils, such as vanilla, cedar, lavender and others. Approximately mixing one ounce of base with a few to several drops of essential oil is your most rudimentary explanation of how to arrive at a bottle of beard oil. But this is hardly the matter at hand. It would seem as though we have much more important things to look into, or, I mean, into which we must look, dammit!
This outdated, anachronistic, very nearly archaic syntactic structural guideline is something that is becoming increasingly removed from the modern American English vernacular, for better or worse, and if you wind up writing it into anything other than literary fiction or poetry, let alone, god forbid, speaking aloud in this way, you’re likely going to be the butt of many cruel Victorian-era-themed jokes. So, what the hell am I talking about? Simply put, where does the preposition go in your 21st century sentence? Of course, you don’t want to sound like a moron, either in writing or in speech, but the standards of old are not necessarily as applicable as they used to be. As is often the case, what had been considered the appropriate practice is shifting, changing, and, now, may well be completely different from what had been the paradigm.
Winston Churchill famously rebuked this passé custom when he exclaimed something to the effect of (but not exactly, as nothing has been definitively recorded as verbatim quotation on the subject), This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put! Far ahead of his time on this matter, Churchill foresaw the imminent demise of the imbedded preposition for a more naturally flowing, more comfortably fitting sentence structure where the preposition dangled off the end of a sentence like a rippling banner off the end of a low-flying biplane. You definitely don’t want to be the guy who’s inviting his friends out to the movies and defers to the group when he asks (aloud, mind you), “To which cinema shall we travel this evening?” That’s a sure way not to get invited to the next movie night. Everyone nowadays just knows, somehow, to ask the question in a more conventional, naturally lackadaisical way.
So, if you’re really interested in getting an answer to the question, “what is beard oil made of,” then you should know how to ask it. You’ll make people uncomfortable and further alienate yourself if you insist on using the imbedded preposition position, as opposed to what is now considered to be the vastly more relatable and accessible sentence-ending preposition. I beseech you, say it aloud and think about how it sounds. That’s how you’ll get answers, attention and find out precisely of what beard oil is made!
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