{"id":2484,"date":"2013-01-25T15:47:17","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T15:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/?p=2484"},"modified":"2013-01-25T15:52:19","modified_gmt":"2013-01-25T15:52:19","slug":"that-train-has-sailed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prettygoodbritain.com\/wp\/?p=2484","title":{"rendered":"That train has sailed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong<\/a>
\nIn Latin, sentences don\u2019t end in prepositions, and an infinitive is one word that can\u2019t be divided. But in a Germanic language like English, as linguists have pointed out, it\u2019s perfectly normal to end a sentence with a preposition and has been since Anglo-Saxon times…<\/em><\/p>\n

We can\u2019t blame Latinists, however, \u00a0for the false prohibition against beginning a sentence with a conjunction, since the Romans did it too\u00a0<\/em>(Et tu, Brute?). The linguist Arnold Zwicky has speculated that well-meaning English teachers may have come up with this one to break students of incessantly starting every sentence with \u201cand.\u201d The truth is that conjunctions are legitimately used to join words, phrases, clauses, sentences\u2014and even paragraphs.<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps these \u201crules\u201d persist because they are so easy to remember, and the \u201cerrors\u201d are so easy to spot.<\/em><\/p>\n