on extraneous prepositions

Seeing as how the topic has been raised (once and again), I cannot but contribute my two cents.

"Chasing after" - indeed, very often abused by Singaporeans, but was there ever any doubt that it has a legitimate use? Local bastardizations, I suppose, usually involve the pursuit of some unidirectionally moving thing/person (e.g. "Wah lau, you let her run away for what? Go and chase after her, lah!"), the redunancy arising from the fact that you could not possibly be chasing said object/person in any other way. My take on it is this: where the preposition would come into play is if one were chasing some concept or abstraction that could be moving in any number of directions or none at all. So love, lucre, happiness, etc. Even then, I can think of exceptions (one wouldn't, for instance, (metaphorically) chase after rainbows/waterfalls (cf. TLC)) Also, the phrase seems to work much better in the passive voice. Hmm. Perhaps it's more a matter of style to insert the 'after' than one of grammatical correctness?

Another phrasal verb that always gets my hackles up is "entering into". On our lovely island, this seems to be interchangeable with simple entering - he entered into the room, the building, etc. - all of which are cases where the simple verb should suffice. Shouldn't the verb phrase be reserved for admission to things that are not obviously enclosed containers (e.g. Jesus entered into the world to save us of our sins)?

And last of all - "change up ". Yuck! Even if one did want to add a preposition, why "up"? There is no up-ness to changing! Aargh! The crosses we bear.

Books (since, now):
The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Will Self
Plowing the Dark - Richard Powers
Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre
and a ton of miscellaneous bridge-related stuff

and if you haven't heard Ryan Adams' In My Time of Need go download and listen and cry if in the mood