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« Yes, but do you buy it? | Main | More lighting-based graffiti » Tuesday, February 27, 2007Zombie rules will eat your brainJohn Leahy, responding to my observations on the inadequacies of Microsoft's grammar checker, asks a question I didn't have space to address: "Is it grammatically correct to start a sentence with And?" Well, it's OK with Yahweh, at least according to all the English versions of Genesis I've seen: "And God said," "And God made," "And God saw," and so on. But the grammar checker was programmed to obey a lesser authority -- someone's high school teacher, probably -- and it says no to And, But, and Or at the start of a sentence. (Strangely, it ignores initial However, another common teachers' fetish.) Is there really such a rule? Coincidentally, the issue comes up in a discussion today on Language Log. Commenting on a series of posts at the Daily Telegraph's website, Mark Liberman notes that public griping can create or enshrine baseless linguistic prejudices: "Sentence-initial however, for example, annoys many people who would never have noticed it if they hadn't been trained to do so." And he quotes fellow linguist Arnold Zwicky on the mythical rule of no-initial-conjunction, or NIC, which is rejected by the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, among others: Paul Brians, collector of common errors in English, labels sentence-initial coordinators a "non-error". Bryan Garner denies, all over the place, that NIC has any validity. Even the curmudgeonly Robert Hartwell Fiske tells his readers that there's absolutely nothing wrong with sentence-initial coordinators. . . . NIC is crap. But still it lives on, as what I've called a zombie rule. . . . Hardly any usage manual subscribes to it, but it is, apparently, widely taught in schools, at least in the U.S., with the result that educated people tend to be nagged by a feeling that there is something bad about sentence-initial and. But there isn't -- no matter what your editor or your grammar checker says. Posted by Jan Freeman at 05:35 PM
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