To boldly go with usage rather than the rules of grammar

Like painting the Forth Bridge, looking after a style guide is a task that is never finished. There are always additions to be made as colleagues continue to get wrong words and phrases that had seemed obvious to you!

But equally the guide requires monitoring to ensure its advice has not been rendered out of date; language does change and these shifts in meaning need to be assessed to determine whether they warrant inclusion.

So I was interested to read a recent blog by the Guardian's style guru David Marsh called 10 grammar rules you can forget.

He seeks to steer a path between grammar traditionalists and acceptable usage - essentially, what is ‘correct’ in one set of circumstances might not be elsewhere. It's the difference between writing a speech and texting your mates.

So he homes in on things such as splitting an infinitive - once described as the most violent act to occur in the BBC's famously genteel radio newsroom. "Stubbornly to resist splitting infinitives can sound awkward," says Mr Marsh. We would agree with that.

Others include ending sentences with a preposition, and the "myth" that ‘none’ is singular (one rule we stick to here).

Whether we agree with his interpretations or not, what this list tells us is that usage can be a powerful tool in deciding how language should be applied, and dictionaries - in our case the Oxford English Dictionary - give helpful steers on such issues.

As young reporters covering crime stories, we happily used ‘forensic experts’ to describe what are now called scenes-of-crime officers. Then the subs pointed out what forensic actually meant: relating to courts of law; so the judge was probably a better candidate to be called a forensic expert. But over the years things have changed, no doubt partly prompted by that misuse (and that is one way that language can evolve: because it is not used correctly).

Now the OED states under ‘forensic’: “relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods techniques to the investigation of crime”.The old definition is still there but this is acknowledgement of a different usage.

Another example is ‘literally’; its acceptance as meaning ‘metaphorical’ has been well documented in recent months.

‘Who or whom’ is an area where usage is shifting. Our audience can be quick to pick us up when a writer confuses the subjective and the objective case, and we do aim to get this right. But as David Marsh observes: "The relaxed tone we prefer these days makes whom increasingly optional."

And the OED advises: "Its use has retreated steadily and is now largely restricted to formal contexts. The normal practice in modern English is to use who instead of whom." Certainly, in a headline on company takeovers, ‘Who owns who?’ would be a crisper option than ‘Who owns whom’?

Purists might resist but dice is now widely accepted as both singular and plural, and the OED informs us that a man can be blonde and a woman blond. In our own style guidance we recognise that data is plural but datum is so rarely used we follow convention and treat it as singular.

Are these changes a bad thing? As in so much else, it's about striking the right balance. If the meaning is clear, sometimes it makes sense for us to adapt alongside the language.

The BBC News style guide