As a great lover of the English language, I have often found myself in the position of having to defend my mother tongue from the torrents of abuse levied at it by my distraught ELL students. To them I praise English’s lexical flexibility, I hail its inherent euphony, and I adulate its allowance for descriptive precision. But, for all of my efforts, I still find that my students complain ad nauseum that English is “too confusing!” Despite my great love affair with English, I have to admit that there are some truly bizarre rules that make English a minefield to navigate, even for those with a rock solid grasp of grammar. In researching this topic I discovered that many of these “rules” that snooty grammarians lord over their linguistic lessers are actually the products of nonsensical grammatical impositions by a group known as Latinists, and we have all been paying the price since.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Latinists attempted to “standardize” and presumably to “improve” English by applying Latin grammatical rules to it, despite the fact that English is emphatically Germanic; a bizarre episode in the chaotic history of English. Robert Lowth–Anglican Bishop and terrible grammarian–wrote the first widely read English grammar book, in which he strictly prohibited dangling prepositions. He claimed that, as preposition comes from the Latin word praepositio, meaning “to put before”, and the fact that prepositions cannot end a sentence in Latin, it is therefore ungrammatical to do so in English. There is, however, a problem with this assertion: ENGLISH IS A GERMANIC LANGUAGE!!!!!!!!!! So, while Lowth was imposing his nonsense “grammar”, great English writers continued to end their sentences with prepositions, as they have been doing since the 10th century.
The same misguided Latinizations gave rise to this head scratcher of rule: don’t split your infinitives. This one can be attributed to another pompous, ecclesiastical Englishman by the name of Henry Alford. According to his grammar treatise A Plea for the Queen’s English, Alford mistakenly wrote that “to” was an essential part of an infinitive verb, when, actually, it is a prepositional marker and is often grammatically unnecessary (though normally included). In Latin an infinitive is one word and, therefore, cannot be split. Thus, the foolish Alford maintained that adverbs in between “to” and its infinitive was Latin-wrong and therefore must be English-wrong. Well, Alford wrong.
So the next time someone tries to nit-pick your grammar, you can tell them to quickly go and look their grammar rules up.