Most of us carry around a small suitcase of grammar rules we picked up somewhere between fourth grade and a red-pen-happy English teacher in high school. We repeat them without question, correct our friends with them, and sometimes even feel a flash of guilt when we break one in a text message. The strange part is that a surprising number of these “rules” were never real rules at all, at least not in the way English actually works.
Some were invented by well-meaning teachers trying to simplify a messy language. Others were borrowed from Latin, a language English has almost nothing in common with structurally. A few just spread because they sounded official. Here are nine of the most persistent grammar myths, along with what linguists and major style guides actually say about them.
1. You should never split an infinitive
The idea that phrases like “to boldly go” are grammatically broken is probably the most famous grammar myth in English. Writers of English had been splitting infinitives since the 1300s, and it was perfectly acceptable until the mid-nineteenth century, when Latin scholars, notably Henry Alford, called it a crime. The objection came from comparing English to Latin, where an infinitive is a single unsplittable word.
The problem is that English infinitives do not work the same way. The truth is that the phrase “split infinitive” is misleading, since to isn’t really part of the infinitive, so there’s nothing to split. By the early 20th century, respected authorities including Otto Jespersen, Henry Fowler, and George Curme were vigorously debunking the split-infinitive myth, explaining that splitting is not only acceptable but often preferable. Yet the taboo lingers in classrooms decades after grammarians closed the case.
2. Never end a sentence with a preposition
This one gets drilled into students so thoroughly that many adults still wince when a sentence ends in “with,” “about,” or “for.” An 18th-century Anglican bishop named Robert Lowth wrote the first popular grammar book to claim a preposition didn’t belong at the end of a sentence, though the poet John Dryden had made a similar claim earlier. The reasoning again traced back to Latin, where sentences simply cannot end that way.
English, however, is a Germanic language, and Germanic languages behave differently. The pedants forgot one small detail: English isn’t Latinate, it’s Germanic, and in Germanic languages sentences routinely end in prepositions, something great English literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare to the King James Bible is stuffed with. Even the Chicago Manual of Style explicitly states there is no rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, recommending it over awkward alternatives unless real formality is required.
3. Sentences can never start with “and” or “but”
This is one of the most widely taught classroom rules, and it has essentially no basis in actual English usage. The Chicago Manual of Style notes there is a widespread belief with no historical or grammatical foundation that it’s an error to begin a sentence with a conjunction, when in fact a substantial percentage of sentences in first-rate writing begin that way, and it has been so for centuries. Writers have been doing it since Old English.
Conjunctions like and, but, and or have been used to start English sentences since as far back as the 10th century, which feels natural because it is natural. Some English teachers have enforced the notion that conjunctions should only join elements within a sentence, but there’s never been any evidence for this belief. Teachers likely invented the rule to stop young writers from stringing together endless run-on paragraphs, not because the grammar itself was wrong.
4. “None” is always singular
Plenty of people were taught that “none” strictly means “not one,” which would make it grammatically singular in every case. That is not accurate, and it never really was. Anyone who prefers the singular form was likely taught mistakenly that none is derived from “not one,” but authorities including the Oxford English Dictionary trace none to the Old English word nan, which meant “not any of a number of things” and was commonly plural.
Modern style guides tend to favor the plural in most everyday contexts. The New York Times’ stylebook advises using the plural in most cases, suggesting writers consider phrases like “not one” or “no one” when they truly mean the singular idea. So “none of the windows are broken” is not a mistake, and in many cases it’s actually the more natural choice.
5. “Whom” must be used correctly or your writing is wrong
Whom is treated by many people as a badge of proper English, something you sprinkle into emails to sound polished. In reality, the distinction between who and whom is grammatically real but functionally fading. Who is used as a subject pronoun referring to the person performing the action, while whom is used as an object pronoun referring to the person receiving the action.
Even grammar guides admit the rule is losing ground in daily speech. As linguist Paul Brians has put it, when a sentence gets too complicated to figure out, picking who means “you’ll bother fewer people and have a fair chance of being right.” Whom has not disappeared, but outside formal writing, insisting on it everywhere is more about style than correctness.
6. “Fewer” is always correct and “less” is always wrong for countable things
The supermarket sign “10 items or less” has annoyed self-appointed grammar police for decades, all in the name of a rule that is far shakier than people assume. The less versus fewer distinction did not emerge from ancient grammar logic; it came from an 18th-century personal preference that got repeated until it hardened into dogma. The less and fewer distinction, along with who and whom, strikes many linguists as needless, since it doesn’t actually add clarity and functions mostly as a social nicety.
There is even a legitimate grammatical argument for using “less” in certain countable contexts. The prescriptivist’s own rule holds that only discrete quantities require fewer, yet quantities below one are not discrete since they don’t exist as a whole unit, meaning “less than one” not only sounds better but arguably makes more logical sense. Most usage guides now treat the rule as a soft preference rather than a hard law.
7. Double negatives are always incorrect
Somewhere along the way, English speakers absorbed a math rule and applied it to grammar: two negatives should cancel out to make a positive. Language simply does not work that way, and it never fully did. This belief stems from an overapplication of mathematical logic to grammar, when in reality double negatives trace back to Old English, where they served as a standard means of intensifying negation rather than canceling it, a practice carried into Middle English.
Standard written English today does discourage double negatives for clarity, but that is a stylistic choice, not proof they are logically broken. In reality, such structures have deep historical roots in the language and serve specific rhetorical or emphatic purposes, though they are often discouraged in formal standard English for the sake of clarity. Many dialects of English still use them productively, and Chaucer himself leaned on them for emphasis rather than confusion.
8. The passive voice should always be avoided
Writing advice loves to repeat that passive voice is weak, vague, or somehow less honest than active voice. That advice is often useful for tightening flabby sentences, but treating it as an absolute rule misunderstands what passive voice is actually for. It exists for a reason, and good writers reach for it deliberately rather than by accident.
Even style authorities are quick to point out that passive voice is not necessarily worse, and it’s simply a myth that the passive voice is inherently wrong. Passive constructions are genuinely useful when the person doing an action is unknown, unimportant, or intentionally left vague, which is exactly why scientific writing and news reporting use it so often. The real rule is not “avoid passive voice” so much as “notice when you’re using it and ask whether it’s the clearest choice.”
9. “Between” is only for two things, “among” for three or more
Many people were taught a tidy rule: two items sit “between” each other, while three or more sit “among” them. It feels clean and logical, which is probably why it spread so widely, but it does not hold up under scrutiny of actual English usage over time. Old English speakers themselves were known to use between with more than two items, so it’s hard to argue convincingly that modern speakers can’t.
The word’s own etymology actually leans toward inclusivity rather than a strict two-item limit. Idioms like “between a rock and a hard place” work fine, but so do countless natural sentences describing negotiations or comparisons among several people using “between.” Style guides now generally treat this as a soft preference for clarity rather than a fixed grammatical boundary.
Final thoughts
None of this means grammar rules are pointless or that anything goes. Clarity still matters, and audiences still notice when writing feels sloppy or inconsistent. What these nine cases show is that a good chunk of the rules people fear breaking were never really rules handed down by the structure of English itself. They were preferences, often borrowed from Latin or invented by a single influential grammarian, that got repeated so often they started to feel like law.
Knowing the real history behind these rules does not give anyone a free pass to write carelessly. It just means the next time someone corrects a sentence ending in a preposition, or insists none must always be singular, there is a fair chance the correction itself is the actual mistake.
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