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Between you and I, "ain't" ain't so bad!

© Kara VanDam

Just so I don't get any nasty comments, I know the above is not "grammatical" to many, certainly not to the people in your life who corrected your grammar growing up. Yet, it is grammatical in the sense that we can all understand what it means. Plus, people say "between you and I" all the time, and "ain't" was perfectly grammatical and acceptable in Shakespeare's time.

The issue of proper speech and grammaticality has a long history, and it affects how we write and how we speak. In this article, we'll discuss the history of grammar, specifically English grammar, but grammar in general as well. Further, we'll see that "grammaticality" the way society thinks of it has less to do with real rules of language and more to do with society's idiosyncratic preferences.

"Grammar" or Syntax (the linguistic term) is the study of the patterns and regularities of language at the word- to sentence-level. Its history can be traced back to the Greeks, 2000 years ago. Greek philosophers placed great importance on structure-- in the natural world, in government, and in oration.

In fact, Aristotle's Rhetoric laid out the formula for oral argumentation, a formula still used to this day. Remember this was at a time when the written word was expensive to produce (no printing press plus expensive papyrus), so the writing undertaken was carefully selected and crafted. This created a highly formal written style, which in turn impacted the spoken style of public oration. The Greeks in everyday life did not speak this highly formal style, but certainly the scholars and politicians showed their education and social class through speaking in a formal style. This formal style became a model for "correct" speech, and it was this speech that the Greek philosophers found worthy of study. They probed and praised its regularities-- how it built words and sentences.

This tradition, like many others, passed to the Romans, and in 350 AD, the Roman grammarian Donatus composed a standard grammar for Latin. You might be wondering, why is that important after all this time? Well, it greatly shaped the English language 1400 years later.

During the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Latin was the language of the university and the Church. As such, it was judged to be the perfect language, and its structures were studied and emulated. English, and the other languages of Europe (French, Italian, etc...) were judged inferior and vulgar, unworthy of study. In fact, when the task of building the Oxford English Dictionary was first undertaken, many scholars felt it to be a waste of time: why study English?

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