Paul Little: I spy with my little 'I' a grammatical error

If loving grammar is showing your age, so be it. Photo / 123RF

A friend, Grant, was staying.

On about the second day he began a sentence with "Me and Brent ..."

"Brent and I," I helpfully corrected.

"Quite right. Thank you," he said.

My wife's eyes rolled. "Seriously?" she inquired. "Absolutely," I told her. "Grant values as much as I the use of correct English on all occasions."

Not so long ago he and I had discovered we both refuse to use supermarket checkouts that advertise themselves as available to those "with 12 items or less" rather than the correct "12 items or fewer" (less is for quantity, fewer is for number).

Mine may have been the last generation to be taught by rote the rules of grammar, as well as long division and useful mental arithmetic.

But if helpfully pointing out their grammatical errors to other people means I'm showing my age, then so be it.

Correct a young person's grammar today and they'll likely laugh in your face - if they have bothered to wait around until you got to the end of the sentence.

They have little interest in rules such as not using contractions - such as "they'll" or "they've" - in written speech.

I asked my adult children to share some memories of being lovingly corrected. "Me and my brother always got corrected," said my eldest daughter.

But did she mean that her use of "me and my brother" in speech was always corrected by me, or that she and her brother were always corrected in tandem. In which case, she should have said "my brother and I always got corrected".

More recently, I've gone to the trouble of asking my youngest daughter, when she says, "I'm like really hungry," whether she means she wants to eat something or that she is in a state resembling that of hunger.

The rules that govern our language are strange indeed. Many were introduced in the 19th century following universal education, taught to the elite who wanted to continue to distinguish themselves from the common folk who were now being taught to read and write.

Most strangely, there are many we use unconsciously. We would never think of breaking these because we don't know they exist. For instance, there is a reason why we will say "abso-bloody-lutely" and never "absolute-bloody-ly". It has to do with where the accent falls.

Many languages, from Arabic to Amazigh and beyond, have official bodies to control them and rule on which words are in or out and which rules to follow.

English doesn't have such a body partly because it is so flexible and adaptable it would be pointless to try to pin it down so formally. That adaptability is one of the reasons English is the dominant international language - the most commonly spoken second language.

Do rules really matter? Not when it comes to making ourselves understood. Take for instance the once scrupulously observed distinction between uninterested and disinterested, which mean quite different things.

The former means not interested, the latter means impartial. These days, however, the latter is used to mean the former and no one has died as a result.

But bothering to make that distinction, or the one between "more" and "fewer" when everyone knows what you mean either way, is still worth it. Because standards are worth having for their own sake.

They are something we can enjoy in common. And if we cling to them while they slip away, then we postpone the free-for-all in which anything goes for a little while longer.

Because the trouble with an anything-goes philosophy is that, all too soon, everything's gone.