Economist sticklers trying to bug me
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My favorite magazine is deliberately trying to annoy me. In the August 22 issue of The Economist there's a feature article about the composition of the universe (dark matter, dark energy, and all that, with a beautiful diagram showing the astoundingly tiny fraction of the material in the cosmos that includes non-dark non-hydrogen non-helium entities like us), and the sub-hed line above the title (on page 66) is this:
Of what is the universe really made?
Come on! Nobody who knows how to write natural English preposes the preposition when talking about what X is made of.
In fact as soon as we get into the text of the article, the material written by an actual writer rather than an angst-ridden subeditor, we get back to English as spoken on planet Earth:
The material around [us], made up of atoms, seems unable to explain what most of the rest of the cosmos is made of.
This, with the stranded rather than preposed of, is normal English style. Normal rather than formal, as I have put it elsewhere.
So it's clear that the editors at The Economist are just trying to bug me. It's personal. They hate me because I try to warn them off using ridiculously unnatural sentences, like their tortured avoidances of split infinitives (see here and here and and here and elsewhere). They resent the very fact that I breathe the same air as them. The editorial nitpickers sit around in their fancy office building at 25 St James's Street sipping coffee out of their little bone china Economist coffee cups, and say, "Let's really get up Pullum's nose; let's see of what he is made."