Want to know what ‘good’ English is? Guess what? You already do.

I love the Oxford Literary Festival. It’s a short hop from where I live and you can choose from hundreds of talks, from cookery to global economic reform. The literary world’s big hitters like Kazuo Ishiguro or Alan Bennett pack the larger venues, but I like the smaller, quirkier talks. Quite apart from the subject matter, it’s a rare opportunity to sit in places like the Bodleian’s Divinity School and admire your surroundings. They’re a lucky lot, Oxford students.

This year, I went to two talks. The first was called ‘I’m right – you’re wrong’ and was hosted by three Oxford philosophers. (You wait all day for a philosopher, then three come along at once…) I had only the shakiest of notions what cultural relativism was (and I’m not much clearer now) but I’m still mulling it over days later, so at least it steered my mind down unfamiliar paths. Academics, it seems to me, can struggle to express ideas in a way that a roomful of laymen can grasp. “Yes, but what’s it for?” demanded one frustrated attendee.

The other was more on my wavelength. Oliver Kamm is an author and journalist who writes for The Times on points of grammar and style. His book is called ‘Accidence will happen – the non-pedantic guide to English usage’. Within the hour, he’d banished my inner pedant, the one that tends to surface whenever I see a misplaced apostrophe or read ‘comprises of’ in an estate agent’s flyer.

Kamm describes many of the so-called rules of grammar as pointless, misguided pedantry. Even before his talk, I knew you can start a sentence with ‘and’ and you can split an infinitive; both so-called rules try to make English follow rules of Latin grammar, which it clearly doesn’t. But I hadn’t realised how many of the conventions of the way we write and punctuate ‘correctly’ are just that: convention, not immutable law.

Reasonably, Kamm’s point is that the only rule is usage. Linguists study language as it is used. And it changes. Pedants and sticklers pontificate about how they’d like it to be used, with fixed rules and withering scorn for the ignorant. Yes, the word ‘nice’ did once mean ‘precise’ but we can’t go back to that use now. It wouldn’t be nice.

Pedants are forever deploring a ‘debasement’ of English. They cite words like ‘decimate’ which at one time meant ‘to kill one in ten’ but now means ‘to kill a high proportion’. In contrast, Kamm celebrates the way that words and their meanings change, and claims the English language has never been healthier. Think about it; how often would anyone use ‘decimate’ in its original meaning? Isn’t it far more useful in its current form?

Kamm agrees that it’s important to educate children to be at ease using Standard English but has no problem with starting sentences ‘So…’ or even (in the right company), “I was, like, you’re joking? He was, like, no, I’m serious…” There were stirrings of discontent at this among his (mainly elderly) audience. People love to feel aggrieved about cultural decline, as the thriving circulation of the Daily Mail proves.

As a freelance writer, I’m occasionally told I’ve written something ‘ungrammatical’. No-one is infallible, but most of the time I haven’t. I’ve offended someone’s idea of correct English based upon a dimly-recalled education or a badly-researched grammar ‘guide’. If that someone is a client, I smile politely and change the phrase that has so upset them. But at least now I know I’m on the side of the people, not the pedants.