Grammar Day

What the day is

Grammar Day is observed on March 4, and the date is the joke: it is the only one in the calendar that reads as an instruction. It was founded in 2008 by the writer Martha Brockenbrough.

Origin and background

Most grammar arguments are really a collision between two different activities. Linguists describe how a language is actually used by its speakers. Style guides prescribe how someone thinks it ought to be used in formal writing. Both are legitimate, and treating a stylistic preference as a law of the language is where the heat comes from.

Two of the most defended rules are imports. The prohibition on splitting an infinitive came from scholars who modeled English on Latin, where the infinitive is a single word and cannot be split even in principle. English infinitives are two words, so there is nothing to break. The rule against ending a sentence with a preposition has a similar pedigree, usually traced to seventeenth-century literary taste rather than to any observed pattern in English, and following it strictly produces sentences nobody would say aloud.

The genuine rules are the ones nobody is taught. English has a fixed order for stacked adjectives, running roughly through opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material and purpose. A native speaker says a lovely big old rectangular brown French wooden writing desk and would never reorder it, yet almost none of them could state the rule. Violating it sounds instantly wrong in a way that a split infinitive does not, which tells you which one is actually part of the grammar.

It is also worth separating the terms. Grammar is sentence structure, usage is which word is correct, style is preference, and spelling is spelling. Most complaints filed under grammar are one of the other three.

How to take part

• Try reordering a string of adjectives and notice how badly it fails.
• Split an infinitive on purpose, and enjoy it.
• Ask whether a rule you enforce describes English or was imported from Latin.
• Correct people less. It rarely improves either the writing or the friendship.
• Read the sentence aloud, which catches more problems than any rule.