When people learn that I’m a linguist, they sometimes imagine that I am an Official Grammar Arbiter. They say things like “Oh, I hate when people say ‘That was fun.’ Don’t you hate that?” Leaving me to wonder why they’d pick on that poor, innocent, perfectly acceptable sentence. Or something equally innocuous. It would be one thing if they’d complain about something ambiguous like ‘downwards’ instead of ‘downward’ or ‘if I were/was’. But it’s often some ordinary sentence that anyone would say.

Last night, a gentleman told me, “I’ve become more tolerant about grammar since reading the history of English.”

“Oh, really?” said I.

“Yes, I used to hate when people would say ‘That’s so great, or so interesting.”

“Um,” said I.

“But now I realise that English has been changing for a long time, and the English we use was once unacceptable. So I’ve become more tolerant about it.”

“That’s good,” said I.