Starting a sentence with ‘and’. And your problem is…?

Copy is a subjective business, and as a professional writer I don’t take it personally when a client asks me to change something. One comment that does make me stare thoughtfully at the ceiling and slowly count to ten, however, is the feedback, “My boss says you’ve started a sentence with ‘And’. That’s not grammatical.”

Well, cop this. You can start a sentence with ‘and’. And if you do, you’ll be in good company. Some of the greatest writers in English literature do. “And did those feet in ancient time/Walk upon England’s mountains green?” William Blake asks. And more sentences in the Bible start with ‘and’ than with any other word. See for yourself: of the 31 verses in Genesis, Chapter One, all but two start with ‘and’.  

What fascinates me about this particular misconception is how long it has been lurching around, a decaying and zombie rule that still pounces on the poor old copywriter when he is least expecting it. Sir Ernest Gowers, writer of ‘Plain Words’ and editor of ‘Fowler’s Modern English Usage’, commented, ”That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with and is a faintly lingering superstition. The OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them.” What’s notable about that particular quote is that Sir Ernest was born in 1880, and his comment was made at least half a century ago.

So where did this ‘lingering superstition’ come from? The most convincing theory is that it’s a legacy of the way English used to be taught back in the 19th century. I remember reading ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ as a kid and thinking to myself that Tom, Flashman and co. spent a lot of their schooldays parsing Latin verse and translating it into English. At the time Latin was held as a template for a good composition and English writing was expected to follow its rules.

So? Well, in Latin, the word for ‘and’ is ‘que’ and it’s stuck on the back of other words: ‘senatus populusque romanus’ means ‘the senate and the people of Rome’. So you can’t start a sentence with ‘and’ in Latin, but so what? You can’t split a Latin infinitive either (it’s just one word), but that doesn’t have to prevent English writers if we want to boldly go where other writers have gone before.

Maybe the final word should go to another, more recent authority on the English language, Bill Bryson. As ever, he nails it. “The belief that and should not be used to begin a sentence is without foundation. And that’s all there is to it.”