To follow or flout? Where grammar rules get murky

Are many people getting worse at using English correctly, or is our language simply evolving? How important are grammar rules, and when, if ever, is it OK to break them?

This tension between ‘prescriptivism’ and ‘descriptivism’ in linguistics fascinates me. Like with many things, my answer to these questions is, ‘it’s complicated’.

As a writer and editor, I can be super finicky about things like word use, sentence structure and punctuation use. And while I enjoy a good grammar joke as much as the next language nerd, I refuse to be one of those pesky grammar snobs.

English is hard.

I’ve always maintained that people who scoff and look down on others for dodgy spelling, punctuation or grammar are focusing on the wrong side of this. The way I see it, with a language so inconsistent and nonsensical as ours, it’s an absolute miracle that some people can get it ‘right’ most of the time!

In the brand content world, we often have choice around our level of freedom when it comes to language use. Not all brands need to be as picky as many book publishers and newspapers, which follow strict (often ancient) style guides (The New Yorker, for example, still insists on a hyphen in ‘teen-ager’ – I mean, c’mon…)

But consistency is an absolute must. Completely abandoning all language rules would, like, literally lead to the Wild West (jokes – of course I would never use that word in that way).

Here are a few quirky bits that have been on my mind…

‘They’ or ‘it’?

Colloquially, when speaking about an organisation, we often (incorrectly) speak in plurals when we should really be using singular language.

Some examples: “KFC make the best hot chips”; “Apple do things differently to other companies”; “Toyota aren’t selling the latest Prius in Australia”. Many people wouldn’t bat an eyelid at these sentences because the mistakes are so commonplace (the bold words should be 'makes’, ‘does’ and ‘isn’t’, by the way). However, especially when written down, they really need to be fixed up.

Where things get murky, in my opinion, is when speaking about smaller groups of people (‘the family’, ‘the couple’, ‘the team’, etc.) I found this particularly awkward back when I was interviewing and writing articles for bands. While a sentence like “Radiohead is releasing a new album” sounds OK, I don’t think you can really say with a straight face “The Rolling Stones is having a reunion tour”.

No ‘buts’?

Many people were taught in high school never to start a sentence with a joining word like ‘but’ or ‘and’. I had this myth busted for me big-time in journo school; it’s simply not an actual rule, we were told. School trains us to expand our intelligence, which can be demonstrated using long and complicated sentences. But this isn’t the most effective way to communicate in the business world. Short sentences sell. And a good way to keep your sentences short is to split up each point.

However… if your audience is older or particularly conservative, it’s highly likely more than a few of them will find your content jarring if you start your sentences with these words, in which case I don’t recommend doing it.

So, this is where we start debating, ‘if some say it isn’t but others say it is, what makes a rule a rule?’

Is ‘whom’ extinct?

Personally, I’m not a fan of language that sounds too stuffy, which means I’ll often go to great lengths to avoid using the word ‘whom’. Can we throw it out altogether though?

‘Whom’ is technically correct when referring to the object of a verb or preposition, while ‘who’ is used when referring to the subject of a sentence. But so many people these days don’t know or understand that, or don’t like it, so they don’t use ‘whom’ at all.

Where ‘whom’ refers to a verb, substituting it for ‘who’ has become so commonplace that it now sounds right to modern ears. For example, "I’m still deciding who I’ll invite’ should really be ‘I’m still deciding whom I’ll invite", but it’s also correct to say, "I haven’t decided who will be invited", so no wonder we’ve thrown ‘whom’ out the window. Likewise, "Who do you like?" should really be "Whom do you like?" but… yuck, right?

Where things get clunkier is when ‘whom’ refers to a preposition (words like ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘among’ and ‘on’) because substituting for ‘who’ often leaves these words dangling awkwardly at the end of a sentence.

For example: "Who did you send the email to?" should really be "To whom did you send the email?" and "Who is the gift for?" should really be, "For whom is the gift?"

But do we still care? What does your audience, upon whom your value depends, really think?