A Little History I Had Forgotten
Over the years I’ve mentioned all four of these incorrect rules, both in the classroom and on this blog. Use the search box in the upper right to find several mentions of each bad rule.
What English language rules are incorrect?
Never split an infinitive
Never end a sentence with a preposition
Never use a double negative
The pronouns “them” and “they” are always plural, never singular
I had forgotten the source of these rules. I think he was mentioned once in my sophomore English class. But I have long known that these rules were bad. Anyway, here’s an essay from Quora on the subject. It was written by Franklin Veaux, published author and compulsive writer. Thank you, sir, for the reminder.
All four of these rules were made up by one person, Bishop Robert Lowth.
Lowth was a religious scholar who was obsessed with the “purity” and perfection of Latin. He had a big-time fetish for Latin grammar. He considered Latin the ideal language, and believed that English should be more like Latin.
In 1762, he published a book on English grammar that made up a whole bunch of new rules, including the four above. His sole rationale for many of these rules was simply to try to force English grammar to be closer to Latin grammar.
Those rules had never been part of English until he made them up, and outside of prescriptivist grammar taught in school, they never caught on. Today, English grammar experts have largely abandoned teaching any of them.
It’s amazing how one person can have such far-reaching consequences on language. I remember having been taught these in school, although by then it was taught as “things to avoid in formal writing” and no longer simply “never do this”. Today, the first three rules seem to have been almost completely abandoned, other than in jokes. I’ve heard a number of people in recent years argue for the validity of the fourth rule; however, I suspect that has less to do with English per se, but rather reflects the discomfort people feel toward people of non-binary gender (who often use singular “they” as a pronoun). I’ve even heard people use singular “they” in the same conversation in which they assert that it’s improper to use singular “they”! (Typically, they accept its use when referring to an unknown person but protest against its use for a known, but non-binary, person.)
Language has a tendency to change, whether grammarians like it or not. I expect that, 500 years from now, “they”/”them” will be the only singular pronouns in common use; “Is she going to the store?” would sound as odd then as, “Art thou going to the store?” sounds today. (I can’t help but picture grammarians of the 17th century protesting against the widespread use of “you” as a singular pronoun!) Like the shift away from “thee”/”thou”, I suspect that the shift to singular “they” will be driven by a perception that saying “they” is safer than “he” or “she” to avoid insult (in this case, insulting anybody whose gender is not obvious); it may also be helped by the influence of languages that lack gendered singular third-person pronouns. (I’m not a linguist, but it is my understanding that, of the top three most-spoken languages in the world, only English has gendered singular third-person pronouns. I can say that I’ve worked with native speakers of Mandarin who have had difficulty remembering to use “she” when referring to women.) Alas, I think it unlikely that this shift would produce so memorable a line as, “I ‘thou’ thee, thou traitor!”