When you teach English, as I do, and you meet a stranger out in the world and they learn you do, they will invariably want to discuss/argue with you about one of two things:
Did Shakespeare write Shakespeare or did someone else?
What do you think about this English grammar fact/rule?
To the first, my answer is a resounding yes. To the second . . . well, it can be a bit more complicated:
How many tenses are there in English? According to linguists, two -- past and non-past.
How many cases are there in English? Three, but only barely -- i.e., only in the case of our pronouns, and otherwise none.
And so forth. Since the Victorians, grammarians have concocted a variety of what I would call faux grammar rules, based on their love of Latin and logic -- and apparently not English in its rich variety and history of Englishes.
Here is Robwords, debunking them in a reliably methodical way that I don't really have the patience for:
Love it! And as a parting shot, here is one of my favorite apocryphal, anecdotal stories about Churchill. Not literally true, but certainly spiritually so:
In the Commons, a rival of Churchill's took him to task for ending a sentence with a preposition. Churchill's response was both swift and devastating. He said, "That sir, is the sort of nonesence up with which I will not put!"
Needless to say: Enjoy!
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