Chaucer used it. Shakespeare used it. The objection arrived in the eighteenth century, and the alternatives have all failed.

Nice meant foolish. Awful meant awe-inspiring. Decimate meant to kill one in ten. Some of these reversals are finished and some are happening now.

Dickens did it. So did Joyce, Twain and Fitzgerald. The complaint is younger than the usage it complains about.

It is in the dictionary. That does not settle the argument, and understanding why is more useful than knowing which side you are on.

“I didn’t see nothing” is not bad mathematics. It is a grammatical feature of many English dialects, and once it was standard everywhere.

Roughly one sentence in ten in published English begins with a conjunction. The prohibition was a teaching shortcut that outlived its purpose.

The rule comes from a poet in 1672 who thought English should sound more like Latin. Nobody has been able to make it work since.

It sounds more careful than “between you and me”, which is exactly why it is wrong. This is what a hypercorrection is and how to spot your own.

The most repeated instruction in creative writing is usually explained badly. What it actually asks you to do is give up a particular kind of adjective.

English puts adjectives before the noun in a fixed sequence. Most of the world’s languages do neither. This is what learners are actually up against.