Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

“Much was said, and much was ate, and all went well.” Clearly this sentence was written by a fourth grader – or at best someone not ushered into acquaintance with “proper” grammar. Like, say, Jane Austen? That’s straight out of her novel “Mansfield Park.”

Linguists insist that it’s wrong to designate any kind of English “proper” because language always changes and always has. A common objection is that even so, all people must know which forms of language are acceptable in the public sphere, at the peril of unemployability or, at least, social handicap.

Fair enough – but there’s a middle ground. We can teach people which forms of English are acceptable without thinking of the more colloquial phrases and words as errors. Rather, what is considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion.

Those who ignore rules of fashion exercise little influence in society, whether we like it or not. But we wouldn’t see someone wearing breeches or petticoats as mentally ungifted, and the same should go for the person who, as millions of English speakers do every day year round, uses they in the singular as in Tell each student that they can hand the paper in until 4.

We are taught that a proper language makes perfect logical sense, and that allowing changes willy-nilly threatens chaos. But we get a different perspective with a trip back in time.

Not to the Stone Age: just to the 19th century, to the characters in, say, Edith Wharton’s novels. Certain expressions that were considered mistakes unworthy of polite company then seem utterly normal today. It’s almost funny how arbitrary these things seem from our vantage point. “Properly,” one was to say the two first people in a line. The well-spoken person said first two only if the people in the line were divided into pairs. Um, O.K. – one sees the logic, but senses a certain triviality. Or, one talked about how a street was well-lighted: lit was considered vulgar, as was have a look at rather than look at. (In fact, it’s the style of this newspaper to use well-lighted.)

Sabine Dowek

To say the house is being built felt slangy and newfangled to many. Better, grammarians thought, was the house is building. Again, we can perceive that they weren’t crazy: “is being” certainly can seem a little weird if you roll it around in your mouth and imagine hearing it anew. Yet who among us would welcome going back to the house is building?

An especially enlightening read is William Cobbett’s book-length lecture to his son called “A Grammar of the English Language.” Cobbett’s sense of what good English was in 1818 seems, in 2012, so bizarre we can scarcely imagine someone speaking in such a way and being taken seriously.

To Cobbett, the past tense forms awoke, blew, built, burst, clung, dealt, dug, drew, froze, grew, hung, meant, spat, stung, swept, swam, threw and wove were all mistakes. The well-spoken person, Cobbett instructed, swimmed yesterday and builded a house last year. In Google’s handy Ngram viewer, using data from millions of books over several centuries, one can see that builded only started falling out of disuse around 1920. Not for any reason; no one discovered that builded was somehow elementally deficient. Fashion changed.

So, hemlines went up, while Lobster Newburg, chintz and sarsaparilla fell out of fashion. Likewise did concerns like chiding people for saying first two – or for saying chided rather than chid, another token of Cobbett’s day.

Today, we have our own fads. We’re more likely to hear about using nouns as verbs – structure a lesson, impact a discussion – or making new verbs from nouns, such as liaise. Yet the verbs copy, view, worship and silence were born from nouns to no complaint. The fashion simply hadn’t yet arisen to condemn them. Or, for that matter, no fuss was made at the time when William Shakespeare and William Makepeace Thackeray, both celebrated as masters of the tongue, used they in the singular form.

Charles Dickens is one more example demonstrating the magnificent evanescence of what is considered sophisticated. In “David Copperfield,” Aunt Betsey says “Mr. Dick is his name here, and everywhere else, now – if he ever went anywhere else, which he don’t.”

Yet Betsey is a distinctly proper lady; we suspect a typo in this slangy seeming usage. But no, she does it repeatedly, later on saying “It don’t matter how much.” Other Dickens characters use don’t the same way – and the fussy ones, not just proletarian folk like Jo the street sweeper in “Bleak House.” Richard Carstone in that book, for example, studying law and medicine and generally using perfectly blackboard-style English, pops off with sentences like “But, O, it don’t matter!” The Ngram viewer again shows us the reality: third-person singular don’t was acceptable English until well after 1900 among many English speakers.

Go a little further back and we see a similarly counterintuitive sense of linguistic propriety, in the famous letters between John and Abigail Adams during their frequent separations. “I wish you was here,” John Adams wrote to Abigail from France in 1778. Abigail had written to John two years earlier worried that “you was poisond at New York.” You was turns up quite regularly in their correspondence. It was acceptable English to John and Abigail – as was at New York, which would have been preferable to in New York.

Thus when linguists observe that language always changes, we do not mean only that Old English became Modern English far back in the mists of time, nor are we referring merely to the ever changing nature of slang. Even educated people’s sense of what it is to speak elegantly changes from century to century.

We readily see that the grammatical sensitivities of the Gilded Age dowager or pedant were aesthetic preferences, of the kind almost always doomed to dissolve with the passage of time. It can be harder to see that the same judgment applies to our own sense of what proper English is.

Yes, people must be taught the moment’s fashions. However, those fashions cannot be equated in any logical sense with intelligence or moral worth. Those uninitiated into these fashions, or even opting to flout them, may not be up-to-date, but they are hardly dim bulbs. As we all know, a person in a Members Only jacket drinking a can of Tab could easily be quite the mental giant.

Draft welcomes submissions at draft@nytimes.com.

John McWhorter, contributing editor at The New Republic and columnist for The New York Daily News, teaches linguistics, American studies and Western civilization at Columbia University. His latest book is “What Language Is, What It Isn’t and What It Could Be.”