No rules

When we were kids in school, language studies were mostly about learning rules — rules for grammar, rules for spelling, rules for pronunciation, even rules for what were and weren't actual words. There seemed to be a right and wrong way of saying and writing everything. For the rest of our lives we may feel a bit guilty, or at least embarrassed, whenever we are caught breaking one of these rules.

Yet the language experts, those with more expertise than our elementary school teachers, insist that what we were taught in school were not so much rules as customs. We were being taught to speak and write like the educated adults in our community. It was something like being taught which fork to use for the salad. Steven Pinker suggests as much when he writes in The Stuff of Thought, "Designating a sentence as 'ungrammatical' simply means that native speakers tend to avoid the sentence, cringe when they hear it, and judge it as sounding odd." Sounding odd is not quite the same thing as being wrong.

As we got older we learned — to our amusement or horror, as the case may be — that ain't is listed in dictionaries, that words used in different parts of the country can mean something different than what we are used to and that the English people, who should certainly know how to to use the English language, don't sound like the people we grew up with. We also became more aware that the "rules" we learned are often inconsistent and sometimes make little sense. A noun is made plural by adding an s. So house becomes houses, yet mouse becomes mice (at least when you are talking about the animal).

Language is always evolving, which is why Shakespearean English sounds so strange to us, even though in Shakespeare's own time it was quite ordinary English. Imagine if language "rules" from that period of history were still enforced today. (William Shakespeare didn't even spell his own name the way we spell it today.) What seems like a rule is simply a custom that has come to be observed by the majority of people in a particular area. Language customs change with time just as other kinds of customs do.