The Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K Pullum review – the pants rule and other pipe dreams

A breezy guide to grammar sides with the ordinary Joe against the nitpickers

Relax: you’re probably not making as many mistakes as you think you are. So says eminent linguist Geoffrey Pullum’s breezy guide to grammar – or, at least, to his own version of it, as previously laid down in mammoth academic treatises.

Literally everything else written about English grammar in the past two centuries, you see, is “hopeless” and a “muddle”. Our re-education requires some renaming of parts of speech and reshuffling of items between them, ensuring a tension between the book’s hope to be a popular guide and the unfamiliarity of its terminology and taxonomy. Pullum even hates the term “parts of speech” itself, insisting that they have nothing to do with speech, which is, at best, an idiosyncratic view and, at worst, an example of how it might be impossible to write about grammar without becoming a little bit crankish.