Final prepositions again

In "Prepositionssss…" (9/2/2011), we quoted from the 1995 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage,

Members of the never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition school are still with us and are not reluctant to make themselves known…

This follows M-W's note that

…recent commentators — at least since Fowler 1926 — are unanimous in their rejection of the notion that ending a sentence with a preposition is an error or an offense against propriety. Fowler terms the idea a "cherished superstition."

And that same 2011 post ends with a list of links discussing the superstition's origin and progress, going back to John Dryden's 1672 attempt to demonstrate that "he is a better poet and playwright than Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare were".

Today I observed this superstition rising again from the grave.

Wikipedia tells us that James Fallows, among many other things, was Jimmy Carter's speechwriter, and it's apparently in that role that he footnotes a sentence from a recent Facebook commentary by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:

That is the prize on which we must keep our eyes.

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In his essay "Why I changed my mind", Fallows offers a transcript of Whitehouse's remarks, and footnotes that sentence:

Minor speechwriting note: This preceding sentence is grammatically correct. But the “on which” part makes it tricky in delivery. Our ears expect to hear “the prize we must keep our eyes on,” no matter what the grammarians might say.

If Sheldon Whitehouse were just speaking off the cuff, he (like nearly all of the rest of us) would naturally end this sentence with a preposition. “We must keep our eyes on.” But apparently he was working from a script, and you could see him trying to make “on which” sound natural as he came across it. With a scripted speech, you can either write your way around the problem—“our eyes must never leave that prize”—or you can have the speaker rehearse the line several times, until the “on which” construction starts to sound natural.

It's interesting that someone like Fallows thinks that "grammarians" endorse the superstition about phrase-final prepositions. In part, this reinforces the deprecative interpretation of the word grammarian, discussed in this post a year ago. But it also shows that  some linguistic zombie-hunting is still needed.