For many years I happily identified as one of those curmudgeonly prescriptive grammarians oft-dubbed “Grammar Nazis” by those playing fast and loose with their ideas of National Socialism. I strongly believed in the formal right and wrong of any specific utterance. And I still believe that an effective writer should know the “rules” of grammar and usage, whether not she hews to this conservative (or reactionary) idea of language in her writing. For example, even if you don’t use “whom” in your writing, you should at least know when it is appropriate and, more importantly, when it is wrong.

But I have since come to a more functional understanding of the rules of language: to the extent they improve clarity and/or force of meaning, they are valuable, and only to that extent. Or, more importantly, they are only important to know when ignorance of them may make your writing unclear. So, for example, if I say “My mother likes David more than me,” and my meaning is really, “My mother likes David more than I do,” then I have done myself a disservice by not observing the distinction between subject and object pronouns.

On the other hand, if I use a word or phrase in a way that is technically correct, but so antiquated given modern usage as to be unintelligible by most modern readers, I have also done myself a disservice. For example, if we are arguing about universal basic income and you say “UBI is good because everyone deserves a basic income,” I might say, “your argument begs the question.” Many modern readers might pause and think, “what question?,” not realizing that “beg the question” is an antiquated term for an argument that tacitly assumes its conclusion as a premise. People now use “beg the question” to mean “raise the question,” but that arose from a mistaken understanding of the original phrase.

This transformation is well documented by etymologists, and has happened since the dawn of the English language. Yet it still infuriates people who really really want the arcane term they learned in college to continue being erudite and inaccessible. I relate to that reaction all too well, but I have recognized it as detrimental to my writing, even if I have yet to truly overcome it.