The Language Wars: A History of Proper English. By Henry Hitchings. John Murray; 416 pages; £17.99. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

AS EVERYONE knows it is wrong to begin a sentence with a conjunction such as “and”. And a sentence cannot be grammatically correct without a verb. Ever. But where do such laws come from? Who instituted them, on what authority? Do such rules actually enhance the beauty and the meaning of the English language?

These are the explosive questions that Henry Hitchings tackles splendidly. It is a commonplace of linguistic philosophising that the way we speak and write shapes the way we think. Mr Hitchings's approach inverts that proposition: here the question is how far ideology—moral, political, aesthetic—has shaped our language.

As the author points out, there is probably not a person alive who does not have some bee in his bonnet about the way other people speak and write. Maybe it is the errant apostrophe, the splitting of the poor old infinitive, or the use of “like” as a comma. Or perhaps it is the exclamation mark, once known as the “shriek mark”.

Mr Hitchings's book is a corrective to some of these linguistic prejudices. It is bracing to learn, for example, that the prohibition on splitting the infinitive is fairly recent. Pre-Victorians did not object. Chaucer was a splitter, and even Shakespeare had a go. Same story with the apostrophe: in the 18th-century authors were sprinkling apostrophes over everything. Though you may think the shopkeeper is ignorant and wrong to advertise “CD's & Video's”, he has history on his side.

Mr Hitchings reviews such matters with cool erudition. He is resolutely relaxed about usage, understanding that correctitude and intelligibility are not the same. So when a London teenager issues the conversational challenge “you chattin' me shit?” the grammar may seem contorted, and the usage may be unfamiliar, but you get the picture immediately. The author explains that he is using London Multicultural, a form of English characterised by African, Caribbean and South Asian borrowings—and the relentless use of interrogative endings, like “innit?”.

Linguistic hygienists have been fighting against such innovations since pen was first put to paper. It is easy to understand why. Words have always been dangerous: Hamlet promises to “speak daggers” to his mother Gertrude. But the record suggests that living languages are not in the end controllable. No way, no day.