A permissive style guide

Imagine that, a language style guide that permits virtually anything you want to say virtually any way you want to say it! It's like a libertarian law book. That's what Oliver Kamm, chief columnist for the London Times, gives us in Accidence Will Happen (2016).

The book represents a slap in the face to what Kamm refers to a pedants, amateur grammarians, sticklers, prescriptivists and other less flattering terms. These are the people who get worked up over split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences. What these people call rules, Kamm calls conventions, at best, and superstitions, at worst.

While pedants worry that the English language is endangered, Kamm says, "If there is one language that isn't endangered, it's English. The language is changing because that's what a living language does."

He devotes most of the book to his permissive style guide in which he not only explains why usages frowned upon by the pedants are perfectly acceptable and often more clear than so-called proper usage but also provides examples of their use by many of the most respected writers in the English language. If Jane Austen can use they as a singular pronoun, why can't you? If Herman Melville and Thomas Hardy can use the phrase "under the circumstances," why shouldn't you?

He finds nothing wrong with the word hopefully, with the phrase "free gift" or with a phrase like "less people." Only a pedant would say, "It's I." The rest of us say, "It's me," and Kamm thinks that's just fine.

Kamm does concede that certain usages are more conventional than others and are preferable in certain situations. What's important to him is to be understood and to avoid sounding stuffy. Thus when you are in doubt about whether to say who or whom, Kamm advises us to stick with who. "Nobody but a stickler will fault you for anything worse than informality, and that is no sin," he writes.