Chapter Four - Whomst Hath the Right to Speaketh Good?

CHAPTER FOUR

Whomst Hath the Right to Speaketh Good?

OKAY, SO YOU’VE got words. You’ve got sounds. You’ve got people naming stuff and stringing sentences together. But something’s still missing, the rules.

Not the rules like “no cursing in church.” The deep, structural rules. The stuff your brain does automatically, even when you don’t know it’s doing it.

Because every language has its own secret software running under the hood. Word order. Agreement. Tense. Case. Gender. Tone. You don’t learn this stuff with flashcards. You just grow up soaking in it until it becomes you.

And that’s grammar.

Let’s get one thing straight: grammar is not about sounding proper.

It’s not about “good English” or “talking smart” or winning spelling bees. Grammar is how your brain organizes meaning. That’s it. You follow rules because you have to, not because a teacher made you.

It’s the difference between “Dog bites man” and “Man bites dog.”
Same words. Different grammar. Totally different meaning.

And every language makes its own choices.

Some languages like strict word order. Others shuffle things around with suffixes. Some cram entire sentences into one long word. Some don’t even have tense. Or plurals. Or subjects. And guess what? They all work. They all get the job done. Language is shockingly flexible and wildly unfair to anyone trying to learn it from scratch.

But here’s where the war comes in.

Once you’ve got grammar, you’ve got differences. Once you’ve got differences, you’ve got judgment. And once people start judging how others speak?

It gets nasty.

Suddenly, it’s not just about “do you make sense.” It’s about do you sound right. Who decides what’s proper. Who gets to correct whom. Who gets hired. Who gets laughed at. Who gets called smart. Who gets told “that’s not a word.”

Spoiler: it’s usually the rich, the powerful, the colonizers, the school board, the newspaper editors, and the white folks.

Grammar becomes class.
Grammar becomes race.
Grammar becomes gatekeeping.

Take English.

Nobody voted on the rules. The dialect spoken around London just happened to be the one that won. So that version, that flavor of English, got printed, taught, spread, and enforced. Other dialects? Suddenly “wrong.” Even if they’d been around longer.

And then came Latin.

The scholars who codified English were obsessed with Latin. It was orderly. Fancy. Academic. So they started forcing Latin rules onto English, even when they made no sense. That’s where garbage like “don’t split infinitives” or “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” came from. Total nonsense. Doesn’t match how people actually speak. Just some dead-language cosplay passed off as logic.

Then came the teachers, armed with red pens.
Then came the textbooks.
Then came the shame.

Meanwhile, the real language kept changing.

Because grammar isn’t fixed. It’s not carved in stone. It mutates constantly. Even while people are yelling “that’s not a real word,” new ones are popping up.

Ain’t. Gonna. Y’all. Lowkey. Flex. Deadass. Ghosted.
All “wrong” once. All standard now. Or getting there at least.

You can’t freeze language. You can’t control how people talk. You can try, sure. And some do. But it never lasts.

Because grammar doesn’t live in a rulebook.

It lives in us.

And we change.