English Rules That Even The Grammar Nazis Got Wrong

Don't let the grammar Nazis get you down! If they've corrected you for misusing that for whom, starting a sentence with and, but and however, or gasp - the sin of "verbing" - fight back!

Jan Freeman of Throw Grammar from the Train blog has a nifty post over at Boston about English language rules that even the grammar Nazis got wrong. For example:

The girl that I marry. No, it doesn’t have to be whom I marry. “People that has always been good English,” notes Bryan Garner in Garner’s Modern American Usage, “and it’s a silly fetish to insist that who is the only relative pronoun that can refer to humans.” Choose who if you like, but to claim that using that “makes a person seem less human,” as Mignon Fogarty suggested in a Grammar Girl podcast — that’s just looking for trouble.

Since you asked. It’s totally legit to use since for because, unless it would cause ambiguity. Since has had its causal sense, as well as its temporal sense, from the beginning.

Link


Well, it's nice post. I can not really say anything about this. Most important thing for me in learning English is communication. As long as we understand what other people write and speak, that's a language.
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“People that has always been good English ...”

Huh? Is there a direct-address comma missing there? Because that's the only way I can make sense of that sentence.
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I believe he is trying to say that you can begin a sentence with "People that..." or with "People whom...". You con't have to associate a form of who with humans.
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I notice that Boston.com has now changed their Globe photo illustration to show a book whose cover reads "Grammar" rather than the previous "Grammer" - suggesting that the initial error was perhaps not intentional. Sad/scary.
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