In the story of a language, just like everywhere else, history is written by the winners: Milroy recounts a typical attitude from an influential historian of English named H. C. Wyld in 1927, who “was quite insistent that the only worthy object of our study was Received Standard English. . . . The language of ‘the Oxford Common Room and the Officers’ mess’ is an appropriate object of study, whereas that of ‘illiterate peasants’ is not.” You practically want to reach back through time and punch the elitism. Wyld wasn’t the first linguistic elitist: before there was the elite Oxford Common Room, there was the Roman forum. The Romans, good at roads and aqueducts and armies, also left a legacy of writing: for over a millennium after the fall of the Roman Empire, if you were educated, you learned Latin. To be an English writer in the era when formal writing was shifting over from Latin to English was to be a self-hating English writer: anything you could do to make English more Latin-like would also make it better. Robert Lowth, who wrote a widely used English grammar in 1762, culled examples of so-called false syntax from luminaries of English writing like Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible—not as hints that perhaps English grammar was actually just fine as it was, but as cautionary tales about how even the greats should have been more Latin-y. It was like a competition to see who could be the most uptight. Lowth gave us an early suggestion against the sentence-ending preposition: “This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.” Lowth himself wasn’t completely against it (after all, he used it himself in “strongly inclined to”), just passing an aesthetic judgment. But later grammarians elevated this preference into a full-on ban, and by similarly specious reasoning objected to infinitive splitting and “they” as singular, despite centuries of prior English usage.