I don’t know about your dentist, but mine has the habit of settling you in the chair, tilting you back to a virtually horizontal position, clamping your top jaw and packing your bottom jaw with cotton wool, and then starting a conversation, which is, perforce, rather one-sided. It so happens that I was at the dentist last week, about four hours after publishing my last blog post.

“My wife,” began the dentist (who is also a co-congregant and friend), “is pretty upset by what you wrote”. I knew immediately what he was referring to. I realized I was going to have to live with my earlier hasty decision, and that I knew what my topic for this week would be. I’ll explain all presently (if this week’s title hasn’t already made it obvious).

But first, to continue my story. After the dentist had worked his alchemy on a recalcitrant tooth, I returned home to discover, in my inbox, a shocked email from a friend of over 30 years’ standing, a Classical scholar, who took issue with my English both in itself and as reflecting Danish grammar, which (if I understood him correctly) he claimed is the real arbiter of how English grammar should be. (My friend is Danish; his English is, like that of all the Danes I know, excellent – as I always say, if it weren’t, there would be precious few people he could talk to.)

So, what evoked these shocked and outraged responses? It was that, once again, I had used a nominative noun as part of an accusative compound noun phrase. Don’t panic! To be specific, I had written:

My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother – Martin – and I to tennis at a fairly young age.

My two erudite friends argued that I should have written:

My father z”l was a keen all-round sportsman, and introduced my brother – Martin – and me to tennis at a fairly young age.

Their reasoning was that, since it would be incorrect to write:

My father…introduced I to tennis

it is similarly incorrect to write

My father…introduced my brother and I to tennis

Now, I don’t want to suggest that their position is eccentric. My blog is read by at least two others who take the same position strongly enough to have written to me on the first occasion I used this construction (and probably many others who didn’t feel strongly enough about it to actually write to me).

I want to first consider the underlying premise behind the argument that what I wrote was incorrect. This is a premise that was originally implicit, but that one of my correspondents made explicit later, writing:

I know that language evolves, and it certainly needs to. But I suspect there’s a vast difference between changes of growth and changes of … neglect (?), where a society – its speakers and its teachers/students–can’t be bothered to care about or learn their language.

That is exactly the fundamental point where I differ from my critics. Their view of English is the one I, and they, grew up with:

I was educated in a school system that taught and practised parsing – breaking down a sentence into its parts and describing the syntactic role of each part in the sentence. Parsing was presented and treated as an exact science, and, for each exercise, there was a single right answer. English grammar, I was raised to believe, was a closed, complete, perfect and unchanging system.

Not coincidentally, this ‘English grammar’ that I was taught was modelled very closely on Latin grammar. Where it didn’t fit, grammarians took a mallet to hammer various round pegs of English into square holes of Latin. The two facts they failed to take sufficient account of were that English is not Latin and that all native Latin speakers are dead! As a result, Latin is a dead language and, therefore, does not develop. On the other hand, a surprisingly large number of English speakers are alive. Trying to impose a closed, complete, perfect and unchanging system of grammar on a living language is a little like trying to fit a jellyfish into a small box: bits will forever be spilling over the edges.

Living languages are changing languages, and the changes are made not by grammarians but by users of the language. There may be some who wish this was not so, but they are not free to decree that it shall not be so. King Cnut (or Canute, as know him) of Denmark (there’s that pesky Denmark again), Norway and England demonstrated that eloquently when he sat enthroned on the beach and commanded the tide not to come in (knowing full well that it would not obey).

To illustrate this process of change, I have cunningly sprinkled through the first 150 words of this post a number of examples of ways in which English has changed in the last 30 years (or, in one case, 400 years). How many of them did you spot as being ‘wrong’, and how many slipped under your radar?

I knew immediately what he was referring to.

I grew up ‘knowing’ that a preposition was a word you must not end a sentence with. You probably know the (possibly apocryphal) chestnut attributed to Churchill. He received either a ‘corrected’ draft of a speech of his, or a very stuffy letter, with an awkward sentence including a preposition moved from its natural position at the end. He scrawled on the manuscript: ‘This is the kind of language up with which I will not put.’ There is no logical reason for this ‘rule’; it serves no purpose, and usually results in a sentence that is harder to understand, since we have to ‘remember’ the preposition until the end of the sentence, when we can reunite it with the verb that it naturally follows. Compare these two examples:

Where is the hat from which he pulled the rabbit?
Where is the hat he pulled the rabbit from?

Of course, you could argue that in the second sentence, from is separated from the hat’, which also makes the sentence harder to understand. In this case, a more drastic rewrite might be best: perhaps something like:

He pulled the rabbit from a hat: where is the hat?

I’ll explain all presently.

Originally, and unsurprisingly, presently meant at the present time, immediately. For example: I’ll do it presently meant I’ll do it now.

From the 17the Century, this gradually weakened, until today it probably means something more like at some indeterminate time in the not-too-distant future.

I bring this example to demonstrate that the meaning of words is fluid, and the changes in meaning are determined not by some official body (What an absurdity the Académie Francaise is, banning words: clearly, Cnut was not king of France.) The meaning of words is shaped by the way they are used. Some people think that the compilers of dictionaries invent what words mean; in fact, they discover the meanings that are already current. A dictionary is a snapshot of a language’s vocabulary as it is used at one moment in time in the real world.

The same, incidentally, is true for spelling. In the mid-1300s, there were heated discussions, and ladies having fainting fits, over the ‘incorrect’ writing of cupboard, when everyone knew it was two words: cup board. Changes like this are a process, and if you happen to be living in the period when this process takes place, you may find yourself arguing about which form is correct, instead of asking (of the journey from two words to one) Are we there yet?

But first, to continue my story.

I’m particularly pleased with this example, since it ‘breaks’ two ‘rules’: Never begin a sentence with a conjunction, and: Every sentence must have a finite verb. Thirty years ago, I would have ‘corrected’ this sentence to something like:

However, first let me continue my story

and ended up with a sentence that seems to me a weaker piece of communication.

So, language is constantly changing, and we should recognise that sometimes we are upset by changes in language in the same way as we are upset by changes in musical styles. Just because I happen to think Western music reached its peak with Bach, and it’s been steadily downhill since 1750, doesn’t mean that Beethoven’s musical style is incorrect. I can rue the change, without condemning it as wrong.

Let’s return now to my correspondent’s suspicion that there’s a vast difference between changes of growth and changes of … neglect (?), where a society….can’t be bothered to care about or learn their language.

I am reminded of two rather different characters: M. Jourdain and Bubba Watson. Jourdain is the foolish bourgeois who aspires to be a gentleman in Molière’s comedy. At one point, he is amazed to discover that: ‘For more than forty years I have been speaking prose while knowing nothing of it!’ We don’t need to study our own language in the abstract; it is sufficient to experience it in our daily lives. It is also unreasonable to expect the majority of language users to undertake serious academic study of their native language; just because I find this stuff exciting, I don’t need to inflict it on others (so feel free to leave).

Bubba Watson is an American golfer who rose to World No 2 in his prime, and who has earned at least $30 million from golf. What brings him here is that he has never had a single golf lesson in his life. He is a purely instinctual player. It’s not that he can’t be bothered to care about or learn golf; it is, rather, that he has a natural gift. Native speakers, I would argue, also have a natural gift.

Language is a functioning democracy. If a sufficiently large number of people decide to adopt a new word, meaning, spelling, grammatical or syntactical structure, it will be adopted generally. Once it is adopted, it is part of English. We might personally think it less elegant or useful than what it replaced (although that is often merely subjective), but we cannot argue that it is wrong.

The point at which a language finds itself at any given moment is a set of conventions, not immutable laws. These conventions have no moral value, and they can be changed with impunity. That’s how living languages function.

Let’s return now to the example that sparked this blog.

My father…introduced my brother and I to tennis.

The fact is, if I’m being completely honest, that this doesn’t sound right to me. Unfortunately, neither does:

My father…introduced my brother and me to tennis.

On this particular journey, from the grammatically conventional ‘me’ to the colloquially increasingly popular ‘I’, I feel more or less equidistant from the starting point and the finishing post, and I can’t really see either. I am confident that, when I write my blog in another 30 years, I will be completely comfortable with ‘I’….and so will you.

Meanwhile, here’s someone who started not just speaking, but also reading, his own language, faultlessly, 9 months ago.