In my neighborhood newspaper recently, a letter to the editor complained of improper grammar used by two prominent educational leaders during the governor’s recent press conference. The writer said she was appalled at the number of grammatical errors in what was surely a piece that had been written and edited for broadcast. She also gave away that the nuns who taught her English did so in the 1950s and early ’60s. This is telling, because that period of time was one of prescriptivism — teaching and following supposed black-and-white language rules.
Among this letter writer’s grievances were using like in place of as or as if; using incorrect past-tense forms of the verbs dive and awaken; and using the word fraught without the “necessary” prepositional phrase with xxx following it (e.g., The situation was fraught with danger rather than simply A fraught situation). She posited that if these teachers didn’t know the “rules,” they clearly weren’t teaching them to their students, and that we were all doomed to “never understand[ing] each other.”
And this is where someone who works with language daily retorts with the mantra “Language is always changing.” Most of us, at least those above a certain age, were taught many rules like those above. But have we thought about where those rules come from? When I was young, I occasionally heard, “Don’t say ‘ain’t’ — it’s not a word because it’s not in the dictionary.” As if there were one dictionary that held the rules on acceptable words according to … some omniscient grammarian in the sky?
There are many, many dictionaries available, and most are descriptive, rather than prescriptive. That is, they are simply a record of usage. If the word ain’t gets used often enough, it will end up in a dictionary. If irregardless becomes as commonly used for what used to be regardless or irrespective, it will be added to the record of usage: the dictionary.
Grammar changes too. I read recently that grammar is only about 500 years old (and people were talking and writing for centuries before that). And some grammar rules we learned make no sense. For instance, you’ve probably heard that using a split infinitive is a no-no. Example: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” To go in that sentence is in the infinitive form. To place the adverb boldly between the two words is “splitting” it and has always been frowned upon. Why? Because in Latin, you can’t split an infinitive — it’s only one word (ire, in this case), so it’s impossible. So why shouldn’t you split an infinitive in English? Because you can’t do it in Latin?? That makes no sense.
So that’s one grammatical change that is a long time coming. And there are others. The point is, English isn’t math. There’s not just one right answer. It’s necessary to be flexible because there’s no true verifiable source for many of the so-called rules. Imagine how boring it would be if we hadn’t allowed such colorful terms into the lexicon as woke as an adjective (“What a woke statement.”) or because as a preposition (“I’m late because YouTube.”) And how would we not allow it anyway? No grammar police could stop the spread of neologisms in this age of the internet.
So learn your grammar and usage rules, but also be flexible. It’s OK for language to change. It’s been doing so for millennia.