Grammar rules everyone should follow
Grammar rules everyone should follow
Following the inaugural Bad Grammar awards, Thomas Jones lists nine grammatical conventions that, depending on context, you may – sorry, might – as well adhere to
by Thomas Jones
The Idler Academy’s inaugural Bad Grammar award was bestowed last week on 100 academics who wrote an open letter to Michael Gove in March criticising the education secretary’s revised national curriculum. The letter reads at times as if it was written by committee, but does it really display “the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better”? Hardly. Like many such gongs, up to and including the Nobel prize for literature, the Bad Grammar award looks suspiciously like the continuation of politics by other means. One of the three judges was Toby Young, whose latest book is How to Set Up a Free School; Gove apparently told fellow guests at a Spectator party last year that he’d like Young to stand as a Tory MP. “The 100 educators have inadvertently made an argument for precisely the sort of formal education the letter is opposing,” Young said. Steven Pinker (no soft leftie) put it slightly differently in The Language Instinct 20 years ago: “Since prescriptive rules are so psychologically unnatural that only those with access to the right schooling can abide