10 common grammatical 'errors' that aren't actually errors.

All of us have, at some point, been corrected for a grammatical error that we have made. It might have been for an essay in English or even another subject at school, or you may have had an over-zealous lecturer at University who had an annoying habit of underlining every other word in red pen.

Maybe you're interested in correct English usage. Perhaps you’ve read through a grammar manual or a writing guide, which has opened your eyes to the numerous mistakes that people make when they write English. Or perhaps you've read ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’, a book which may have left you starkly aware of the many errors that abound in other people’s (and your own) written English.

More annoyingly still, perhaps you’ve been corrected on the internet by a so-called ‘Grammar Nazi’ for committing a heinous grammatical crime. The chances are, you weren’t even aware of the mistake until it was pointed out to you, probably with a side dish of smug. It’s funny how, on the internet, an innocuous typo or a misplaced apostrophe can cause such an angry reaction from a person armed with nothing more than a keyboard, an internet connection and a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of English grammar.

While it’s a good idea to ensure that your written English is clear, unambiguous and accessible, I would like to say that I take a dim view of the grammar know-it-all culture that’s all too common on the web. One of the reasons why I am a staunchly against Grammar Nazism is that not all grammatical ‘errors’ that some people like to correct are in fact errors. Some so-called errors are legitimate English constructions that are no less part of the English language than nouns, verbs and horrendous spelling rules. In this article, I will explain 10 of these pseudo-errors, but this is not by any means an exhaustive list:

1) You should never split an infinitive

You’ve probably heard the rule that says you shouldn’t split an infinitive. Granted, this prohibition isn't too common nowadays because most people realise it's complete rubbish. Inserting an adverb between to and a verb is splitting an infinitive. The rule states that you’re not allowed to say ‘I’m going to quickly trim my nails’, for example, because the infinitive ‘to trim’ has been split in half by the adverb ‘quickly’.

The idea behind this rule is that an infinitive is a single grammatical unit and cannot be broken down. ‘To run’, ‘to go’, and ‘to exaggerate’ is the infinitive of the verb, so splitting the to and the verb form with an adverb is ungrammatical, according to this idea..

In reality, English actually has two types of infinitives: the full infinitive with to, and the bare infinitive, which is simply the verb on its own without the to. In other words, a verb doesn’t have to follow to in order to be an infinitive. In the sentence, ‘I can burp on command’, there is a bare infinitive burp. Furthermore, according to some grammatical analyses, the to is actually a peculiar type of auxiliary verb, rather than part of the infinitive itself.

The prohibition against splitting a full infinitive, which arose as recently as the 19^th century, was probably enforced by the fact that Latin doesn’t allow split infinitives. All infinitives in Latin are made up of a single word. Obviously you can’t split up a single word with an adverb, so split infinitives are outright impossible in Latin.

But split infinitives have been part of English for a long time, and they don’t hinder comprehension or make a sentence clumsy. In fact, it is sometimes necessary to use a split infinitive, because in some circumstances all of the other possible word orders actually change the meaning of the sentence.

R.L. Trask gives this example:

She decided to gradually get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.

Gradually splits the full infinitive to get. If the adverb were moved, where would it go?

She decided gradually to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.

This implies that the decision was gradual, not the act of getting rid of her teddy bears.

She decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected gradually.

This implies that the collecting process was gradual.

She decided to get gradually rid of the teddy bears she had collected.

This is better than the first two options, but it splits the phrasal verb get rid of, and sounds a little clumsy.

She decided to get rid gradually of the teddy bears she had collected.

Again, this sounds unwieldy.

It’s true that the sentence could be completely re-written to avoid a split infinitive, but there is no need to resort to that. Split infinitives are part of the English language, and any objection against them is bogus. We can’t force Latin grammatical rules on to English. If we do, we end up with something that is English but not as we know it.

2) Don’t end a sentence with a preposition

Thankfully, this ludicrous objection is less common now than it was in the past.

Prepositions are those little words such as at, in, with, to and under that establish the location of a noun. Usually, you will find a preposition before a noun or a noun phrase; e.g. under the table, inside my house, on Mars, etc.

In English, there is a construct known as preposition stranding that allows you to move a preposition away from its normal location in certain situations. One of the main places where you see preposition stranding is in a wh-construction (a sentence that contains a question word such as who, which, why, how, etc.)

In a wh-construction, the question word, which is the object of the verb, is moved to the beginning of the sentence. When making a statement, you say, for example, ‘I gave it to him’, but when you change the statement to a question, you would say ‘who did you give it to?’ It’s also possible to say ‘to whom did you give it?’ but the first option with the word-final preposition is much more common in present-day English.

The first known proscription against preposition stranding was raised by John Dryden in 1672 when he objected to Ben Jonson's 1611 phrase the bodies that those souls were frighted from. He didn’t say why he objected; he just didn’t like it.

Later, grammarians who were influenced by Dryden agreed that preposition stranding was bad, probably because it’s not allowed in Latin, a vastly superior and more refined language than our lowly and barbaric English tongue.

None of the arguments against preposition stranding hold up, however. It is a well-established feature that has parallels in other Germanic languages. Also, some so-called prepositions are part of a phrasal verb, a single unit that happens to be comprised of two words.

‘Give up’ is a good example. Although it’s two words, it has a meaning that can’t be deduced from the dictionary definitions of give and up. What’s more, you have to say ‘I won’t give up’. You can’t do anything but have ‘up’ at the end of the sentence, and why would you? Grammatically speaking, it’s not even a preposition. It's part of a phrasal verb.

3) Don’t start a sentence with a conjunction

And here's another silly objection that somehow manages to ignore the way that people use English in the real world. A conjunction is a linking word such as and, but and however. The purpose of a conjunction is to join two clauses together.

Since Anglo-Saxon times, writers have been using conjunctions to start a sentence. It is often more effective to advance a point by ending a sentence and starting a new sentence with a conjunction than to use a comma, which has a much weaker effect.

Many of the great authors of our time will cheerfully ignore this rule. All the time in the spoken language, we use a conjunction after a long pause. The belief that you cannot start a sentence with a conjunction is persistent, much like mould in a damp house, but the best grammar and style manuals will tell you that the objection is unfounded.

4) Hopefully should only mean ‘in a hopeful fashion’, not ‘I hope that...’

Originally, the adverb hopefully had just one meaning. It was a regular verb-modifying adverb meaning ‘in a hopeful manner’, as in ‘the mouse edged towards the cheese hopefully’.

Since about the 1930s, however, this word has taken on a second meaning. The new meaning has now become the most popular. It means ‘hope that’, or ‘it is hoped that’, and it modifies the whole sentence instead of just the verb. 

When you read the sentence ‘hopefully, the next mousetrap we buy will be more humane’, there is no ambiguity at all. You know exactly what it meant because this is how the word hopefully is most often used.

The objection is based on the idea that the meaning of words cannot be allowed to change. The original meaning must remain the only meaning. But this is patently untrue. The English language is constantly evolving, and while we don’t have to embrace every change that happens, we can’t hope to embalm or freeze a living language.

Hopefully is hardly unique in being an adverb that modifies a whole sentence. Its usage is parallel to certainly, regrettably and ironically as sentence modifiers. There is nothing bad or strange about using hopefully in this way, and it is in fact fully standard in English.

5) It’s ‘ten items or fewer’ not ‘ten items or less’

This is a contentious one, and probably the most controversial. Those who uphold a distinction between less and fewer would say that we should use fewer when we're referring to a noun that can be counted, and less when we’re referring to a grammatically singular noun that can’t be counted..

For example, you can count dogs, onions and grains of rice, so you should say ‘fewer dogs’, ‘fewer onions’ and ‘fewer grains of rice’. You can’t count abstract concepts or mass entities such as water, rice or work (not without using specific measurements), so you must say ‘less water’, ‘less rice’ and ‘less work’.

In current usage, the comparative less tends be used with both countable and non-countable nouns. Fewer is more or less restricted to formal writing. Many supermarket checkout signs will say ’10 items or less’, not ’10 items or fewer’, although Tesco recently replaced its ’10 items or less’ notices with ‘up to 10 items’ to avoid the issue.

Historically, less has been used in English with countable and non-countable nouns since time immemorial. Around 888AD, the great writer and translator Alfred the Great used less with a countable noun:

Swa mid læs worda swa mid ma, swæðer we hit yereccan mayon.

With less words or with more, whether we may prove it.

The distinction between less and fewer arose as a rule only in 1770, in an attempt to ‘clean up’ the English language. Although this rule is often enforced in written English, it is a bogus rule which doesn’t reflect common usage.

6) You must avoid the passive voice

Alternatively: ‘the passive voice should never be used.’

Actually, no grammar manuals or language scholars have ever attempted to ban the passive voice outright, but many have tried to discourage it.

In 1926, in his authoritative A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Henry Fowler recommended against transforming active voice forms into passive voice forms, because doing so ‘...sometimes leads to bad grammar, false idiom, or clumsiness.’

In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell recommended the active voice as an elementary principle of composition: ‘Never use the passive where you can use the active.’

Objections against using the passive voice are still alive and kicking. The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) stated that:

Active voice makes subjects do something (to something); passive voice permits subjects to have something done to them (by someone or something). Some argue that active voice is more muscular, direct, and succinct, passive voice flabbier, more indirect, and wordier. If you want your words to seem impersonal, indirect, and noncommittal, passive is the choice, but otherwise, active voice is almost invariably likely to prove more effective.

All of these objections may have some validity, in the sense that excessive use of the passive voice can make a piece of prose seem dull and unwieldy, just like overuse of any construction can disrupt the flow of a piece of writing.

However, the English language still has a functional passive voice for a reason. It’s because people use it! If the passive voice were truly useless, then surely nobody would use it anymore and it would die out. The passive voice is an important device for promoting the object of a verb in the case when the doer (the subject) is unimportant or unknown.

Consider the sentence ‘the boy was struck by lightning’. Here, the most important topic is what happened to the boy. This requires the most emphasis. If you re-phrased it as ‘lightning struck the boy’, you would be avoiding the passive voice, but you would also be responsible for creating a hideous monster of a sentence.

The passive voice is useful for changing the order of a sentence when the object of the verb is more prominent than the subject. Consider the sentence: ‘the patient was murdered by his own doctor.’ Contrary to the criticisms against the passive voice for being indirect, this sentence is direct and vigorous. It’s arguably more direct than the active equivalent, which would be ‘the patient’s own doctor murdered him’.

In the sentence ‘a man was found dead’, the passive voice is ideal because it doesn’t matter who found the man dead; it’s the fact that someone found him dead that’s important.

There are also a number of set phrases that are passive, such as ‘that said, ...’ or ‘it is rumoured that...’ You'd have better luck walking straight into Mordor than turning ‘it is rumoured that she will resign’ into an active sentence. (What would it be? ’They rumour that she will resign?')

Like any construction, the passive voice shouldn’t be overused, but it is a legitimate grammatical feature in English that serves a useful purpose.

7) Don’t  use they as a singular pronoun

Singular they (and its inflected forms them and their) refers to an entity that is not necessarily plural, or to a group of people whose gender isn’t known or specified. Singular they typically occurs in one of two situations:

a)       It is used to refer to a person whose gender is not known or specified, such as:

 ‘One student failed their exam’

‘Whoever parked their car outside the shop left their lights on’

This usage is known as epicene they.

b)      Singular ‘they’ can also refer to a group of people in general:

‘Anyone who has been affected should contact their doctor’

‘They say that cycling is good for you’

This usage is called generic they.

Be it epicene or generic, singular they has been around in English for a long time. It’s not a recent innovation by any means. Consider these examples, some of which date back over 500 years:

Eche of theym sholde ... make theymselfe redy. — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)

Arise; one knocks. / ... / Hark, how they knock!  — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)

I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

It is true that singular they has increased in popularity recently, displacing generic he as a gender-neutral pronoun. Many grammarians of the past prescribed he as the only correct generic singular pronoun, although this rule was not followed by everybody. He and they have co-existed as generic pronouns for a long time.

Singular they has boomed in popularity due in part to the rise of the feminist movement, which criticised generic he for being misogynistic; i.e. maleness is standard, and femaleness is a deviation from the norm.

Whether or not you ascribe to this way of thinking, they is an immensely useful pronoun because you can talk about more than one person without having to refer to a particular gender, or if you don’t want to specify whether you are referring to one person or a group of people.

Grammar manuals are split over the 'correctness’ of singular they, but it is now by far the most common way that English speakers and writers refer back to singular antecedents such as ‘whoever, anybody, somebody’ and such like. It’s a less controversial gender-neutral pronoun than he, and it is far more natural than all the alternatives such as he/she or one.

8) None should only be used with a singular verb

There is a common misconception that the pronoun/determiner none should be treated as singular because it is a contraction of 'not one'.  The idea is that one is singular, so in a similar fashion, none should always agree with a singular verb.

This is another silly and artificial rule that completely ignores actual English usage. None is just as likely to imply ‘not any’ (implying plurality) as ‘not one’. Its etymology should not dictate whether it’s singular or plural. Even in Old English, its forerunner nān appears as one word which could take either singular or plural agreement.

The plural usage of none has been around for a long time; it appears in the King James Bible as well as the works of John Dryden, a notorious grammatical pedant.

Other pronouns such as some, most, many, all, and more can be either singular or plural.  Just as we would say ‘some of it is’ or ‘all of it is’, we would also say ‘none of it is’; likewise, as we say ‘some of them are’ or ‘all of them are’, we would say ‘none of them are.’ None can either stand for ‘not one’ or ‘not any’, depending on whether the noun phrase is singular or plural.

Insisting on forcing none to agree with a singular verb when the noun phrase is plural produces bizarre sentences such as ‘none of these people is happy’. This doesn’t match up with the equivalent usage of other indefinite pronouns such as some and all. The sense here is clearly plural: none stands for ‘not any’. 

If anyone claims that none can only be singular because it derives from ‘not one’, they have fallen into the etymological fallacy, an erroneous belief that the original meaning or usage of a word is the only true one.

9) You should only use data as a plural noun

There is a common objection to the usage of data as a singular noun because it was borrowed from a plural noun in Latin, meaning ‘[things that are] given’. It is the plural of datum, a singular noun which is sometimes used in English in the general sense of ‘an item given’. A measurement or result might be known as a datum in cartography and geography, especially in the phrase chart datum, but it’s not a common word.

Despite having been borrowed as a plural noun, data is now often used as a singular mass noun, much like information. You will see ‘the data reveals something unexpected’ (singular) alongside ‘the data reveal something unexpected’ (plural). Many newspapers will use data as either a singular or a plural noun, depending on the preferences of the author and the editor, although in scientific writing data still tends to be plural.

Let’s think about why data is now often treated as a singular noun. First of all, does it look like a plural noun? No. All regular plurals in English end in –s, but data does not. To anyone well-versed in Latin, data might obviously be a plural neuter noun, but it has been nativised to act like an English word. That is, the grammatical properties of the noun have changed to fit in with the rules of English. And because it looks like a singular noun, it is well on its way to becoming singular.

Also, as I mentioned earlier, data has a similar meaning to information, which happens to be a singular noun. Technically speaking, information is an uncountable mass noun. You can’t have one information or two informations. You simply have information. Likewise, you just have data.

I do not have a problem with people who continue to use data as a plural noun. After all, English is subject to variation just like any living language. Data hasn’t been fully adopted as a singular noun yet, even though this seems to be its most common form now. But it is futile to insist that data should be a plural noun because it was borrowed from a Latin plural. English isn’t Latin, and data looks like it should be a singular noun in English.

10) Don’t say ‘literally’ when you mean ‘figuratively’

Like it or not, the adverb literally has more than one meaning. In its older and original sense, literally means ‘word for word’ or ‘actually’. If someone literally jumped for joy, then that’s exactly what they did.

Recently, literally has acquired a second meaning, and this is the one that many people object to. In the new proscribed usage, literally is used metaphorically as an intensifier for figurative statements. If I said I was ‘literally over the moon’, you’d know that I hadn't actually left Earth's orbit.

The new meaning of literally is controversial because some people claim that the word should actually be figuratively. According to the original meaning of the word, being ‘literally over the moon’ is a lie; you’re not literally over the moon at all! You're figuratively over the moon.

Some people, however, are set on the idea that the new meaning of literally indicates a lack of basic language skills by those who use it. One blog that I read claimed that misusing this word could leave you ‘literally’ jobless. I had no idea that using English in the way that most people use it can be grounds for dismissal, but there you go!

In truth, words are allowed to have more than one meaning. Just think how many different meanings you can get from the word set, for example. The new usage of literally might not be universally accepted, but it’s very common for words to change their meaning, just as it is for some words to have two or more different meanings. To claim that literally must mean actually and that any other meaning is incorrect is to subscribe to the etymological fallacy.

Conclusion

To some extent, this article highlights the clash between the prescriptive and the descriptive approaches towards language. Prescriptivism attempts to set down rules to codify how language should be used, whereas descriptivism describes how language is used in reality.

Although I certainly lie on the descriptive end of the spectrum, as you can probably tell, I would never claim that ‘anything goes’. Language with no rules at all is not language, because there would be no way to communicative effectively with anyone.

The good news is that, as English speakers, we know all of the important grammatical rules of English without having to consult a manual. English grammar is internalised in us (if you're a non-native speaker then obviously you've had to learn the grammatical rules of English, but you just know the grammar of your native language without having to consult a manual.) 

There are a few minor points of contention which may or may not be acceptable in Standard English, but using less where prescriptivists would say we have to say fewer does not impede communication at all. It just so happens that some people have, in the past, decided that fewer is more correct and more standard.