Ed Huntress wrote:

"Guido" wrote in message
...

Most of them come from Fowler's Modern English at least they
look to be from his examples of how following certain rules
will mark you out as an unthinking idiot.


That sounds possible. They look like those lists of rules that are meant to
be broken.


Preposition at end: It was once a cherished superstition
that prepositions must be kept true to their name and placed
before the word they govern in spite of the incurable
English instinct for putting them late ('They are the
fittest timber to make great politics of' said Bacon; and
'What are you hitting me for?' says the schoolboy).

Fowler goes on to describe how the chief support of the
superstition, Dryden, used to translate all his writing into
Latin and back again to get rid of his English natural instinct.

Most of the original list fall into what Fowler describes as
either superstitions, or fetishes.