It's a big night on Thursday at the Idler Academy, which hosts its second annual Bad Grammar awards. The founder Tom Hodgkinson promises "a thrilling X-factor for pedants".

This year's judges – Jeremy Paxman, restaurateur Rowley Leigh and the Guardian's own Hadley Freeman – will be assessing a shortlist that includes Tesco (for their "most tastiest" orange juice and a fewer/less confusion), the cafe chain Apostrophe, for the apostrophe in its slogan ("Great taste on it's way"), and shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt, teased in the House of Commons by Michael Gove for misusing a semicolon and committing the sin of tautology.

Well, it's a little bit of fun, isn't it? Like the Literary Review's Bad Sex award, except in this case for language. A chance to have a laugh at Apostrophe's apostrophe, take a politician down a peg or two … where's the harm?

Everywhere, that's where. Because the Bad Grammar prizegiving is far from a merry little jape. It's a piece of reactionary nonsense eagerly endorsed by Michael Gove, who has gone out of his way to promote the nonsensically reactionary "grammarian" who inspired all this drivel, Nevile Gwynne, the author of Gwynne's Grammar. The horribly right-wing and entirely wrong-headed prejudices behind the book and the prize explain why last year's winners were some academics who'd written in protest about Gove's education policies and why the smart money this year is on poor old Tristram Hunt and his apparently heinous semicolon.

I can see why Gove likes Gwynne's stern strictures – they must appeal to his sense of a return to traditional values and that always-mythical time when rules were rules and pupils were nervous.

The only drawback is that Gove, Gwynne, Hodgkinson and the judges don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about – my apologies, about what they're talking. On the odd occasion when they do happen to tackle grammatical structures, these self-appointed language guardians are the ones who always get things wrong – "most tastiest" for example, isn't a mistake but a popular and perfectly valid emphatic construction. However, most of their examples have nothing to do with grammar at all but the conventions of spelling and punctuation. Fair enough, the Bad Grammar award sounds more dramatic than the Footling Points of Literary Etiquette award; but that's what it really is.

This will come as news to everyone connected with this shitey wee prize, but the term "grammar" refers to the way words are organised in a sentence and amended to add extra information (like adding an "s" to a noun to make a plural). Like every language, English has many grammatical rules and regulations – over, or if you prefer, more than 3,000 of them. These are the rules that have been itemised by a succession of academic grammars and which are taught to the billion people currently learning English as a foreign language. Many of these rules, such as adding an "s" to form a plural or placing an "a" or "the" before a noun, are simple, because English has such a (relatively) straightforward grammar. But many are marvellously complex – take the order we put different sorts of adjectives in sequence: first opinion, then size, then age, shape, colour, origin, material and finally purpose. (We native speakers would never talk about a "black little dress" or a "wee shitey prize".)

The inspiring and almost universally unacknowledged truth is that we are all brilliant users of our grammatical rules – the real ones, not the bizarre stipulations up about which traditional grammarians get steamed.

This basic fact, like the rules themselves, has formed the basis of academic linguistic study for going on a century. The traditionalists have persevered with their delusions of correctitude only because they have managed to pretend that academic linguistics doesn't exist. That's why the bibliography in Gwynne's dreadful book stops at about 1898. Academic linguistics in turn has ignored Gwynne and co, much as astronomers don't pay any attention to Mystic Meg.

But in failing to mount any noticeable challenge to the language police, academic linguists have left the rest of us easy prey to nonsense and ashamed of our English when we should be celebrating our extraordinary mastery of a language which really is ours. No matter how we say our words or which words we use, we native speakers form a collective democracy of experts.

Unaware of this and every other revelation of modern linguistics, Hodgkinson, Gwynne, Gove and all the other know-nothing know-it-alls happily continue to peddle their sneering, condescending, dismissive, misanthropic, elitist, made-up twaddle.

• Harry Ritchie's English for the Natives: Discover the Grammar You Don't Know You Know is published by John Murray