Does someone who says ain’t have bad grammar? How about someone who eschews whom? What about the writers who leave their participles dangling or their infinitives split? Does someone who misuses hyphens have bad grammar? What about someone who’s just a poor speller?

The word grammar has several meanings. Some are very broad, others very specific. Most of the time, people use the word grammar to mean proper English. In this broad sense, errors of any kind equal bad grammar, and error-free writing equals good grammar. Many extend that idea all the way to questions of punctuation and even spelling. That’s not wrong, per se. But it’s a bit of a stretch and not very useful for our purposes.

Some people use the word grammar to judge informal and colloquial speech like ain’t. That’s a mistake. Just because people who use a certain word are marginalized doesn’t mean the speech itself is wrong. If a word is recognized by dictionaries, that makes it valid. Ain’t is. So you can debate all day whether ain’t is appropriate in a college dissertation or on a resume, but that’s not grammar. It’s propriety—questions about what is appropriate that are qualitatively no different from questions like whether you should wear a suit to a job interview or use the F-word with your grandmother or chew with your mouth open at a fancy restaurant. Strong feelings may abound. But that’s not grammar.

What about stuff like using like in place of such as or over in place of more than? Let’s extend that further to include questions like whether you can use bring and take as synonyms, whether healthy can mean healthful, and whether nauseous can mean nauseated.

Yes, these types of questions fall under the broad umbrella of grammar. In fact, when people speak about grammar, they’re usually talking about word choices like these. But if you want to be more specific, and we do, this is usage. It deals with how individual words are used and when it’s proper to use them. We’ll talk about usage in part 2 and get a solid handle on the tools you need to tackle any usage conundrum with confidence.

But, first and foremost in this book, we’re concerned with grammar in its meaning of syntax. Sentence mechanics. The way words line up and change form to make sentences. When they do so in a way consistent with established patterns in the language, we say these sentences are grammatical. When they step outside the bounds of these patterns, we say they’re ungrammatical. Below are a grammatical sentence and an ungrammatical one. Can you tell which is which?

With going the am on movies Saturday Jane I to.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The first example is ungrammatical. The parts aren’t working together. They’re in the wrong order. Of course, word order isn’t the only determinant of good grammar. Word forms, especially verb conjugations, matter, too. But word arrangement is a huge part of grammaticality, as we see when we move those words around: I am going to the movies with Jane on Saturday. Often, there’s more than one way to arrange words grammatically, as you can see by moving on Saturday to the beginning of our sentence. But the point is that the parts, like gears, have to align in ways that make the machine run properly. That machine is the sentence. Our first example, then, is a broken pile of rusting parts.

Our second example is grammatical. In fact, it’s probably the most famous example of grammaticality in a sentence. It was used by the groundbreaking linguist Noam Chomsky to make the point that grammar has little to do with logic or meaning. A nonsense sentence can be grammatical if those gears are working together according to the rules of syntax. In this book, grammar means syntax: the way words, phrases, and clauses work together, like gears in a machine, to form sentences.