Grammar Girl here. Today we're going to tackle an interesting question. When we talk about

proper English, what exactly do we mean? It's actually a complicated question, so I've

brought in guest writer Elizabeth Little to walk you through it. She's the author of

a new book called Trip of the Tongue, which describes her travels across America meeting

people who speak different dialects. So when we talk about proper English, what do we

mean? Do we mean the English that you can take home to your grandmother? Do we mean

the English that will impress your boss? Or do we mean the English that everyone will

understand? Well, most of the time we mean all these things. When we go looking for grammar

guidance, we're hoping to refine our tone, our sophistication and our clarity, we want

at the end of the day to be better writers. But if we mean all those things, then what

we should really say is standard English, although it would probably be even more accurate

to say the English that a very few people agreed upon about 600 years ago and that we're

now mostly stuck with. Because when we use the phrase proper English, we're playing into

a whole mess of stereotypes and misconceptions about language. And all it takes is a quick

look at the history of standard English to see why this might be true. I like to think

of a standard variety of language as the lingua franca for speakers of a single language.

A speaker from West Texas, for instance, might have trouble understanding a speaker

from South Boston. But neither one of them has any trouble watching the national news,

which is conducted in standard English. The type of English that just about everyone

will understand wherever it's spoken. English first flirted with written standardization

back in the 9th century. When Alfred the Great noticed that everyone's Latin wasn't

what it used to be, is it ever? And requested Anglo-Saxon translations of quote, those books

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