Over at the Commentator I have been offering some thoughts on grammar and good English:

What to make of this claim that grammar lacks "encoded rules"? First, the trivial logic point. It does not follow that because a language evolves and is necessarily always changing, there is not at any one time a coherent and identifiable set of rules.

Take Michael Rosen’s own article. Nitpickers and pedants could rummage around in it and find certain grammatical infelicities. My computer’s Grammar Check picks up a few. But overwhelmingly his article sticks to a well-defined set of rules and linguistic conventions. In fact it reads smoothly and cogently. So does almost every other article on the Guardian website. Each of them is following impeccably not only the main conventions of English grammar but also countless points of tiny grammatical detail.

This has not happened by chance. It is because our English grammar rules have emerged and been codified over a period of centuries, and then adopted by all educated people. The fact that some people, no doubt an increasing number of them, have not mastered these rules or can’t follow them doesn’t mean that the rules don’t exist or do not apply in mainstream English communication. They do.

The really disturbing aspect of this article lies elsewhere. It gives comfort to the proposition that good education and acquiring top-level skills in communication somehow don’t matter. It’s all relative! If you want to speak and write ungrammatically, that’s fine.

Nay, it is more than fine. You’re involved in a revolutionary struggle, fighting back against all those 1% elitists in Selfridges who have arrogated to themselves the right to "stake a claim over literacy".

Read the whole thing.

Mind you, I struggle with the distinction between:

  • I’m on the boat which arrived this morning
  • I’m on the boat that arrived this morning

Isn’t the latter preferred, even if in speech most people might now use the former?

Sir R Renwick (my old boss as HM Ambassador in South Africa) would always correct (sic) my drafts in this annoying way. He’d replace "The government are constantly having problems" with "The government constantly are having problems" as if it was (were?) wrong to split the parts of the verb in a split infinitive sort of way. So I dutifully took up the idea.

This came up in the editing of my very Commentator piece. I had written Renwickly "I instead am brooding on XXX" but the editor suggested "I am instead brooding on XXX". His version sounded more natural. But is it good grammar?

Aaaaaiiiieeee. I started a sentence with ‘But’.

The point is that these are microscopic details on the margins of the way we talk and write. It’s a safe bet that in 200 years’ time English will not be as it is now. That does not mean that the grammar and style rules we now have are invalid or elitist.

On the contrary, they give us incredible precision and subtlety in the way we use words, to the point where foreigners think we are perfidious when they have not understood what in fact we were saying.