Grammar "Rules" That Are Actually Myths

A surprising number of English "rules" that generations of students were taught to follow strictly aren't actually rules of English grammar at all — they're preferences invented by specific 18th- and 19th-century grammarians, often based on trying to make English resemble Latin, that later style guides quietly walked back once linguists examined their actual origins.

Never split an infinitive

The rule against splitting an infinitive — putting a word between "to" and the verb, as in "to boldly go" — is probably the most famous invented rule in English grammar, and its origin is almost comically specific: 19th-century grammarians objected to split infinitives largely because Latin infinitives are a single word ("amare," to love) and therefore literally cannot be split, so English, the reasoning went, shouldn't split its two-word infinitive either. This argument assumes English grammar should mirror Latin grammar, which has no actual linguistic justification — English and Latin are different languages with different structures, and there's no reason a rule that makes sense for an unsplittable one-word Latin form should apply to English's naturally two-word infinitive. "To boldly go where no man has gone before" is not just acceptable but frequently clearer and more rhythmically natural than the stilted alternatives ("to go boldly," "boldly to go") that strict adherence to the rule would require.

Never end a sentence with a preposition

The rule against ending a sentence with a preposition traces to the 17th-century writer John Dryden, who criticized Ben Jonson's use of preposition-final sentences, again largely on the reasoning that Latin doesn't allow it (Latin prepositions, by their grammatical structure, can't strand at a sentence's end the way English ones naturally can). Winston Churchill is widely credited with the sharpest rebuttal to this rule, reportedly responding to an editor who'd rearranged his sentence to avoid a final preposition with some version of "this is the sort of English up with which I will not put" — a deliberately absurd sentence demonstrating that rigidly avoiding a final preposition can produce far worse English than simply allowing it. "That's the book I was talking about" is natural, clear English; the contorted alternative, "that's the book about which I was talking," is more formal-sounding but not more correct — both are grammatically valid, and modern style guides have almost universally abandoned treating the first as an error.

Never begin a sentence with 'and' or 'but'

The idea that a sentence should never start with a coordinating conjunction is another rule with no basis in actual English grammar; it appears to have originated largely as a simplified teaching tool for young students prone to stringing together run-on sentences with "and," rather than as a genuine grammatical constraint on the language. Some of the most stylistically admired writing in English begins sentences with "and" or "but" for deliberate rhetorical effect, and major style guides, including the Chicago Manual of Style, explicitly note that there's no actual grammatical rule against it.

Never use 'they' to refer to one person

As covered in more depth in this site's history of singular "they," the objection to using "they" for a single person of unspecified gender is a comparatively recent 18th- and 19th-century prescriptive invention, not a longstanding rule of English — the usage itself is documented in Chaucer and Shakespeare, centuries before grammarians began objecting to it on the logical (but historically late) grounds that "they" is "supposed" to be strictly plural.

Why these myths took hold anyway

All four of these invented rules share a common origin story: they emerged from a specific historical period when English grammarians were actively trying to elevate the language's prestige by making it conform more closely to Latin's grammatical logic, treating Latin as an inherently more "correct" or "pure" model for language structure generally. Modern linguistics rejects that premise entirely — Latin and English are simply different languages with different grammatical structures, and neither is more logical or correct than the other — but the invented rules persisted for generations in schools and style guides simply because they'd already been taught as fact long enough to feel like settled grammar rather than one grammarian's 18th-century opinion.

A fifth myth: 'less' is always wrong for countable nouns

The fewer/less distinction is real and worth maintaining in careful writing — "fewer" for countable nouns (fewer apples), "less" for uncountable mass nouns (less water) — but the popular idea that using "less" with a countable noun is a flat grammatical error, rather than a matter of formal register, overstates the case. Supermarket "10 items or less" signage is frequently cited as the canonical example of this "error," but linguists studying the actual historical record note that "less" was used with countable nouns in English writing for centuries before 18th-century grammarians began treating "fewer" as obligatory for that context — meaning the popular objection to "10 items or less" is itself a comparatively recent prescriptive rule being retroactively applied as though it were a timeless law of the language, precisely the historical inversion this entire piece has been describing.

Why it's worth knowing these are myths, even if you still follow them

None of this is an argument that these older, more formal conventions are wrong to use — split infinitives, sentence-final prepositions, and "fewer" for countable nouns are all perfectly reasonable stylistic choices in the right register, and following them is never itself an error. The actual, practical value in knowing their real history is being able to distinguish a genuine grammatical rule (the kind that changes a sentence's meaning if violated) from an inherited style preference dressed up as one — so that a colleague, teacher, or editor's confident correction can be evaluated on its actual merits rather than accepted purely on the authority of "that's the rule," when in several of these specific cases, it demonstrably isn't, and never really was.