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Lucy Mangan: All style and substance

What is life if not a constant patrolling of those ever-porous mental borders between rational beliefs and irrational prejudices? Especially ones pertaining to grammar?
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Lucy Mangan column: Language Illustration: Demetrios Psillos for the Guardian

The latest edition of the Guardian style guide is currently being compiled, with all the debate that entails. At home I am embroiled in at least eight different email arguments with friends who saw the sketch in last week's episode of That Mitchell And Webb Look, in which a man shot his colleagues for pronouncing "specifically" "pacifically"' and so on, and have remained overexcited ever since.

In both my personal and professional life, then, battle lines are being drawn. Here, I think, is where I stand:

• We should be allowed to uncouple a "to" from its verb with impunity. The unsplittable infinitive is a relic, a hangover from the days when Latin – whose infinitives are comprised of1 only one word and literally2 could not be split – was regarded as the perfect language.

In reality, not splitting infinitives regularly3 results in ruined rhythms and altogether unhappier sentences. I tend not to split them, because I can't face justifying myself to all those who would complain, but I state here for the record that I adhere to the rule primarily out of sloth and cowardice, not out of moral principle.

• The whole pronouns-must-agree-with-antecedents thing causes me utter agony. Do you know how many paragraphs I've had to tear down and rebuild because you can't say, "Somebody left their cheese in the fridge", so you say, "Somebody left his/her cheese in the fridge", but then you need to refer to his/her cheese several times thereafter and your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants' factory? Billions, that's how many. Even if the Queen, Noam Chomsky and Stephen Fry said it was permissible to use "their" to refer to a defiantly singular, sexless something, I couldn't. It's not right, and for once its wrongness is mathematically provable. Look. 1 = 1. 1 not = 2. I crave a non-risible gender-neutral (not "it") third person sing pronoun in the way normal women my age crave babies.

• I try to mind only the practices that4 actually destroy meaning. "On either side", for example, means something quite different from "on each side". Why embrace the elision of a neat and useful distinction? This annoys me. "To appreciate" does not mean to be grateful. It means to be aware of, to be fully cognisant of something. Why lose that meaning and give it one for which we already have a perfectly serviceable word? This makes me want to kill things.

Random deployment of "less" and "fewer" gives me a physical pain, but marks the point at which I suspect legitimate complaint starts to shade into personal prejudice. I can't honestly conceive of a situation in which using "less" when referring to a number of things or "fewer" with regard to an indivisible something would create true confusion. I just thrill to the existence of such a Jesuitical nicety. Similarly, I should probably try to overcome my hatred of "sick" (which I would prefer be reserved purely for vomit) being used to mean "ill" (general term, may or may not involve use of plastic bucket).

But what is life if not a constant patrolling of those ever-porous mental borders between rational beliefs and irrational prejudices? So let us stay vigilant. And argumentative. Thanks for reading, by the way. I really appreciate it.

1 Just kidding! "Whose infinitives comprise..."

2 Stand down, it's a true fact.*

*Tautology. But intentional. For comic effect.

3 Just kidding again – "frequently".

4 I have terrible trouble with that/which. I think what follows is an essential clause, but I always have to do it by feel rather than knowledge, just like when I try to turn the right way out of a shop. And again, my best efforts ensure that I get it right slightly less often than leaving it to chance would accomplish.

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