> that's rustic and colloquial at best.
nope, the other way around; "don't end sentences in prepositions" is a formal rule iirc. Quoting Grammarly website,
* Which journal was your article published in? (Casual)
* In which journal was your article published? (Formal)
"In which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?" is perfectly good English. It sounds better to me that the "which ... in" version. (British English speaker.)
To my ears, a slight improvement to this would be to use the word "Into" instead of "In":
"Into which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?"
Or within which, with which, yields a pleasant alliteration.
This is the type of errant sentence up with which I will not put.
with that I'd put myself up with, but nice would be if more was written text along the lines of this...
Re:How to Write in Plain English
by ghostpepper on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @11:07AM
(#24272101)
This is a fascinating discussion.
Could the tension/buffering in that sentence be resolved with something like: "Which basket has got that exquisite marble figurine"? When spoken by a native speaker 'has got' would likely be contracted to "which basket's got"
Sub out 'has got' for 'contains' if you want to be more formal.
The "in" is logically related to "which basket", so one would expect that the question would actually be *"In which basket...", but nope, that's rustic and colloquial at best. I suspect it's because of the word inversion in questions, since in dependent clauses the order is reasonable: "I put the figurine in this woven concrete basket over there".