We all have our hobbyhorses when it comes to the finer points of English grammar. Simon Horobin's witty book provides the antidote to our pedantry. I have never been fond of using 'they' as a singular pronoun: a gender-neutral replacement for the dreaded 'he'. I assumed this practice was a modern fad but Horobin informs us that writers, including Shakespeare, have been at it since the Middle Ages. Sentences that begin with 'And' also make me cross but, again, history appears to be on their side. The King James Bible is full of such constructions.

If the English language has always been in flux and if the concept of 'purity' is wrong-headed then who has the authority to make rulings on proper usage? We can agree on many of the basics, but what about the niggling little issues that provoke such passion? Horobin reveals that even the declarations of towering figures such as H. W. Fowler often came down to personal preference. Upon occasion, Fowler could be decidedly rigorous. He wanted us to say 'It is I' rather than 'It is me' because, in Latin, the nominative follows the verb 'to be.' Sometimes, he could be winningly dismissive of fusspots. When enumerating a list of points some insist on deploying 'first' - not 'firstly' - followed by 'secondly,' 'thirdly,' and so on. Fowler described this as "one of the harmless pedantries in which those who like oddities because they are odd are free to indulge, provided that they abstain from censuring those who do not share the liking."

Fowler also observed that "what grammarians say should be has perhaps less influence on what shall be than even the more modest of them realize." Horobin is not distressed by the resulting chaos. He revels in the linguistic muddle that has defined our language for centuries and contemporary complications - such as the Asian hybrid tongues of Chinglish and Japlish - are more than welcome. Even the innovations stemming from electronic media are given a fair hearing. John Sutherland famously decreed that "texting is penmanship for illiterates". Horobin concedes that translating Moby Dick into emojis is probably a lunacy too far but insists that the new forms are "often a sophisticated attempt to convey the attitudinal and emotional information typically associated with speech in a written medium." Whether or not this excuses the excessive use of exclamation marks in emails remains, of course, a matter of taste.

Horobin makes the perfectly reasonable point that language's fundamental role is to convey meaning successfully. He asks us to think of Mick Jagger singing "I can't get no satisfaction." As listeners, we don't carp at the use of a double negative and we certainly "do not respond with: 'Well, if you're perfectly satisfied what are you complaining about?'" We understand what Mick and the boys mean and, if anything, the sense of dissatisfaction is intensified by breaking a cardinal grammatical rule. The lyric works a treat and it is hard to imagine "I can't get any satisfaction" being a massive hit. This doesn't mean that using double negatives in a job application letter is a good idea. Context is key.

Horobin's book has its share of provocative moments. Members of the campaign to preserve 'whom' after prepositions will not enjoy being told that they are prolonging a "very forced and artificial mode of speech" that is "pretentious in most interactions." Even they must admit, however, that there is a great deal to applaud in these pages. The historical survey of how the language evolved is scholarly but lively and we learn all about the tides of trade, travel, conquest and immigration that have transformed our vocabulary. The results have been spectacular but it's a shame that some words were supplanted: next time you send a birthday card to your nephew think how nice it would be to send one to your 'sweostor-sunu' - the lovely Old English for, as you'll have guessed, "sister's son."

I'll end by thanking Horobin for exposing the ways in which language can be used as a "cipher for other social values". Intelligence, politeness, and even moral probity are supposedly reflected in the grammar we deploy and, worse yet, we are judged by the accents and dialects in which we speak. I'm a decent guy with lots of degrees and I'm also a Hartlepudlian, so you're much more likely to hear me saying "nowt, pet" than "nothing, darling." I see no reason to change my ways.