The powerlessness of grammar to rein in the language

Wednesday, 10 December 2025

The stuff of classroom nightmares for many a young non-grammarian.

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.

OPINION: Mention grammar and the effect is like tear gas. People flee. Hands clamped over eyes and ears, they head overleaf to the letters to the editor. And they are wise to do so, for reasons I shall come to.

I get a lot of emails bemoaning the state of English. My correspondents point out a range of horrors and urge me to hold them up to ridicule. Just this week a friend wrote to decry the sentence, “the couple has two children”. Surely, she said, has should be have.

Well now, there are two ways of looking at this. One is the right way. The other is the grammatical way, and grammatically the sentence is sound. The word couple may feel plural, because it involves two people, but grammatically it is singular. So it takes a singular verb – has.

However, this supposed rule is constantly broken. Choose between has and have in the following sentence: “The final whistle blows and Canterbury … won the Ranfurly Shield.” Grammatically “has” is correct because there’s only one Canterbury, but the commentator is just as likely to say have because there are 15 blokes in the team. So, is the commentator wrong? No, he is not. The language is as it is, not as grammar says it ought to be.

English is a living organism. It began half a million years ago as a range of single-celled grunts and evolved from there into the complex beast it is today. And the rules by which it has evolved are not the rules of grammar. They are the rules described by Darwin, the blind and inexorable process of natural selection. Variations in the language occur. Those that prove useful survive. Those that don’t, don’t. And that’s it.

Grammar may intimidate, but ultimately it is powerless against the language, argues Joe Bennett.

Grammar has nothing to do with it. Grammar only describes a language. It doesn’t prescribe what happens in it. Grammar is powerless.

Who is it? I cry when you knock at the door, and you reply It’s me. But in the 19th century you’d have been considered vulgar. You should have said It is I (because, as we all know, a copula verb takes a nominative complement). But today It is I is archaic. Everyone says It’s me. Usage has won over grammar.

Nevertheless the pronoun I still feels posher than me. So you will often hear people on their best linguistic behaviour saying between you and I , believing it to be both formal and correct. It’s anything but. Between is a preposition and prepositions take the accusative, so between you and me is grammatically correct.

Now, I could no more say between you and I than I could gouge my eyes out with a heated knitting needle, but if others persist in saying it - and I fear they will - it will one day become the accepted form, and the children that I do not have will come of age saying between you and I without a qualm and that will be that. It is tempting to see this as decline, but all it is is change. In the 18th century it was correct to say you was.

All children are born into Eden. So the child born today will take today’s English, flaws and all, to be the ideal form of the language, the form against which they’ll judge all later variants. And in 60 years time they’ll be writing to the paper about its misuse and decline.

In other words, to bemoan the state of English is to weep on your own grave. Strictly between you and me, the language will go where it goes, indifferent to our minding. (Though it won’t stop some of us minding.)