The trouble is, most of these rules are wrong. “I’ve never seen a book so bad on my subject,” says Pullum of Gwynne’s Grammar. “It’s the familiar old nonsense, modified through 200 years of rubbish, from teachers who didn’t quite understand it to students who understood it less.” Split infinitives, for instance, have been commonly used for hundreds of years. Another myth is that the word “none” is always singular (so you can’t say “none of them are coming to the party”, you have to say “none of them is coming to the party”), even though it’s been used since the 1640s and the plural version was the more common form for 300 years. There’s a similar ruling against using “they” to refer to a single thing. “That would mean that you’re not allowed to say ‘nobody seems to think the rules apply to them’,” Pullum says. None of these are uneducated mistakes or modern slang: as Pullum points out, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen use singular “they”. But still, a certain kind of person insists that it’s bad English.