From “I before E except after C” to split infinitives, Susie Dent explains why some of our best-known grammar rules don’t tell the whole story.
I’ve been thinking a lot about rules recently, and how we are expert at them without even knowing it. I’m not talking about the serious kind: the ones that tell us to always stop at red lights, remember to pay our taxes, and to never drive home in a car that isn’t ours.
Nor is this about the rules that are simply good manners, like never chewing with our mouth open or taking the last biscuit before offering it round. It’s the linguistic kind that fascinates me, since there is a twist in their story. It turns out that the ones we were sternly taught at school are mostly the ones that don’t matter, while those that really run the show are never mentioned at all.
I’ll start with the one we all remember: I before E except after C. It’s intended as a handy mnemonic for mastering English spelling, which after all is one of the trickiest educational journeys any of us will ever take. The trouble is that the number of exceptions to the rule makes it almost worthless. Consider the sentence: “Weird foreign neighbours seize eight beige sleighs”, and you’ll get the idea.
An episode of QI once calculated that there were 923 common exceptions to the rule, and that’s only counting the words containing CIE.
Then there is the infinitive, which we have long been told must never be split – we say “to boldly go” at our peril. Yet, before the Victorians decided that it offended linguistic decorum, it had been happily used by writers for centuries. As for ending a sentence with a preposition? Another no-no.
My English teacher would wince if anyone dared to write: “Who did you go with?” The argument, centuries ago, was that in Latin you can never end a sentence with a preposition, and so the same rule should apply to English. The fact that English never signed up for Latin’s rules seems to have been overlooked, and for three centuries or more, an imperfect argument has been held as sacred.
The problem is we all need rules in life, and language is no different. Without standards in grammar, things might get a little chaotic, and clarity (and even beauty) will be lost. When it comes to English there is no government or authority telling us what is right and wrong. The aim of modern lexicographers is to describe English and its evolution rather than to lay down the linguistic law.
Happily, everything is not lost. There are rules in our language, and we all follow them flawlessly without ever having been taught them. My favourite one involves what linguists technically refer to as “ablaut reduplication”, and it is rather sweet. This “rule” involves combinations of words such as “tick-tock” or “ding-dong”, when the sound tells us which word to put first. None of us will ever play pong-ping while dally-dillying in our flop-flips and eating a Kat-Kit – there is simply no other way for us to say these jingling phrases that sounds right. No one ever sat us down and explained this: we just know.
Then there is the unspoken rule governing English adjectives when we have more than one. We instinctively know which order they must come in according to a sequence of categories: “opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose”. It sounds complicated, but let’s just say that if I told you that I had a glass blue Cornish lovely old little bottle, my career in words might be over for good.
So let’s hear it for the rules, as long as they are the democratic kind. It’s a curious fact that the ones we were taught rarely work, but those we can actually never break were written by nobody, taught by no one, and are kept, perfectly, by all of us every day.
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