1061. Ever wonder why we say "It's raining" even though "it" doesn't refer to anything? We explain the logic behind this quirky English rule. Then, we look at some of the most dramatic moments in grammar history, including a semicolon duel, a costly comma mistake, and a famous book with 5,000 typos.
1061. Ever wonder why we say "It's raining" even though "it" doesn't refer to anything? We explain the logic behind this quirky English rule. Then, we look at some of the most dramatic moments in grammar history, including a semicolon duel, a costly comma mistake, and a famous book with 5,000 typos.
The "dummy 'it'" segment is by Karen Lunde, a former Quick & Dirty Tips editor and digital pioneer who's been spinning words into gold since before cat videos ruled the internet. She created one of the first online writing workshops, and she's published thousands of articles on the art of writing. These days, she leads personal narrative writing retreats and helps writers find their voice. Visit her at ChanterelleStoryStudio.com.
"Ghost Town Mad" by Lex Friedman.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, in honor of National Grammar Day, March 4, we're going to start with a hard-core grammar topic and then move on to some of the most dramatic grammar stories in history. And if you stick around to the end, I even have a fun familect song!
by Karen Lunde
This question came in from a listener: Why do we need the word "it" at the beginning of sentences, as in "It rains quite often"?
Well, the English language has plenty of quirks, and this is one of them. Who or what is the mysterious "it" that keeps doing all this stuff?
We find the word "it" in sentences like:
Think of "it" in these sentences as a special kind of pronoun. Most pronouns stand in for actual nouns — like when we say, "She went to the store," where "she" stands in for "Sarah," or "Squiggly ate them!" where "them" stands in for "the cookies." But this "it" is more like a grammatical placeholder. In formal grammar-speak, we call this an "expletive" or "dummy" subject. It's kind of like putting extras in movie scenes when the real star is the action itself.
Let's break it down with an example about the weather: "It is raining." In that sentence:
In that sentence, "it" isn't actually referring to anything specific — it's just there because English sentences get stage fright without a subject. It's like having a stand-in actor who doesn't actually perform but needs to be there so the show can go on.
You might have been confused when I referred to the placeholder "it" as an "expletive." Casually, we usually associate expletives with swear words. But in linguistic terms, an expletive is just a word that doesn't have a semantic context of its own — it serves only a grammatical function, like the "it" in "It's raining."
It's also worth explaining that the word "it" isn't always a mysterious stand-in for some absent "who" or "what" — it plays different roles depending on how you're using it.
When "it" refers to something specific, it's just a regular pronoun, like in:
"I bought a book. It was expensive."
Here, "it" clearly refers to the book.
There's also an anticipatory "it." That's when the word "it" saves a place for something that comes later in the sentence. As in:
"It bothers me that people litter."
The real subject is those three words referring to a singular thing: "that people litter." You could put the subject first if you wanted to:
"That people litter bothers me."
But that sounds less conversational; most of us don't talk that way. For whatever reason, we like it better with the dummy "it" at the beginning: "It bothers me that people litter."
Not every language has this placeholder "it," though. In some languages, you don't need the stand-in at all. Linguists call those "null-subject languages."
Let's look again at our "It's raining" example. Spanish, for example, doesn't need the placeholder "it." Instead, the verb itself does the heavy lifting. When a Spanish speaker says "llueve" — which literally means "rains" — the way the verb is conjugated tells you everything you need to know. It's the complete package, no extra words needed. English insists on having both a subject and a verb ("it rains"), while Spanish is like, "Nah, we've got this covered with just the verb!" Their verbs are super-powered that way. Italian and Portuguese, which are also Romance languages like Spanish, are similar; the verb conjugation does all the work.
Japanese rarely uses pronouns at all; the subject is often implied by the context. The same is true for Mandarin Chinese and Korean if the subject is understood. Linguists call these "pro-drop languages" — where the pronoun is dropped because it's already understood.
So next time you say, "It's beautiful outside," you can appreciate this tiny but mighty word. It's doing absolutely nothing, yet somehow, it's an essential part of how we express ourselves in English.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a former Quick and Dirty Tips editor who has crafted hundreds of articles on the art of writing well. She was an online education pioneer, founding one of the first online writing workshops. These days, she leads personal narrative writing retreats and helps writers find their voice. Visit her at ChanterelleStoryStudio.com.
by Mignon Fogarty
In honor of National Grammar Day, I thought it would be fun to focus on the "history" part of the show because even though grammar, and usage, and punctuation are about simple little things, like where to put your commas or whether "whom" is still a thing — and yes, it is — sometimes grammar gets messy. I mean duels, scandals, and millions-of-dollars-lost kind of messy.
Let’s start with what might be the most dramatic punctuation fight ever. It happened in Paris in 1837. Two law professors apparently got into a heated debate over whether a particular passage should have a semicolon or a colon.
The details are a little fuzzy, but this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill editing spat. No, these fine academics got so worked up about punctuation that they did the most 19th-century thing possible: they dueled. With swords.
Which was illegal at the time. Bad law professors!
And yes, they risked life and limb over punctuation — at least kind of. It turns out that duels in the 19th century were more about drama than death. French dueling conventions of the time apparently meant that the fight was stopped once honor was deemed satisfied, which the combatants' seconds often helped mediate.
French author Marcel Proust also fought a duel with pistols over an unflattering newspaper article in which neither man was hurt, and some reports say they intentionally shot their guns into the air.
Going back to our punctuation duel, the professor who thought it should be a semicolon received an arm wound, and the one who thought it should be a colon walked away unscathed.
Next, going back a little earlier to 1802, an American businessman named Timothy Dexter, who was both wealthy and eccentric, wrote a short autobiography called "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress," and it would be an understatement to say he threw grammar out the window. He defenestrated it with gusto.
His book had no punctuation and random capitalization. It was chaos. But his life was so wild and his tale so finely told that the book was a success, going into at least eight printings.
Still, readers complained about the lack of punctuation, so in the second edition, Dexter added a whole extra page — an appendix with just a bunch of punctuation marks, and he told people to use them to "pepr and solt" the text as they pleased.
And as an aside, he was either incredibly lucky or a master salesman because he got rich selling people things that seemed to make no sense, like mittens and bed warmers to people in the West Indies.
Next, you probably know about Charlie Chaplin — the silent film star and comedic genius with a little mustache. But did you know his grammar once became tabloid fodder?
In 1927, during a messy divorce, his much younger wife, Lita Grey, told the press that Chaplin was — brace yourself — bad at grammar. He had said she was "not intellectually satisfying," and she countered by reporting that they had tried to learn Latin and French together, but couldn’t because of Charlie's poor language skills.
Can you imagine such headlines today on TMZ or in "The Sun"? “Hollywood Star Can’t Use a Relative Pronoun — Fans Stunned!”
Next, if you think Twitter fights are bad, try 16th-century England.
In the 1520s, two rival Latin grammar teachers — Robert Whittington and William Horman — went head-to-head in what historians now call the Grammarians' War.
Whittington championed traditional, rote learning. And Horman pushed for a more modern, example-based approach. Their conflict blossomed when some prominent schools chose to use Horman's Latin primer instead of Whittington's.
But much like our dueling law professors, this wasn’t a polite academic debate. Whittington was offended by the preface to Horman's book, which he took as criticism of his own work, and he published scathing satirical verses about Horman and even posted them on school doors. Their contemporaries then took sides, each group publishing a flurry of biting pamphlets and poems.
It sounds to me more like it was a poets' war, but a couple of years into the fray, the Horman camp essentially won when a primer by his supporter, William Lily, was adopted nationwide.
Next, we have a case where the stakes are higher because it actually involves the death penalty.
Roger Casement was an Irish revolutionary, and in 1916, he was tried for treason after seeking German support for the Easter Rising in Ireland.
The language debate came in when Casement's lawyer argued that he hadn’t technically committed treason — because of a comma.
The law, written centuries earlier in Norman French, was ambiguous, and it wasn't clear whether it applied to acts committed abroad. The answer on appeal hinged on whether a certain mark in the old document was a comma, a bracket, or even just an old fold in the paper.
Ultimately, the court decided it was a comma, and Casement was hanged.
Casement had wanted his lawyer to take a different approach, and before he was hanged, he complained from jail, saying, "God deliver me from such antiquaries as these, to hang a man’s life upon a comma and throttle him with a semi-colon.”
Next, this one isn't quite life and death, but it was costly in dollars and cents.
In 1872, the U.S. government was revising an earlier Tariff Act.
As with tariffs today, everybody was trying to get their products exempt, and one of the exemptions was supposed to be "fruit-plants," like lemon trees and grape vines. But somebody put a rogue comma between “fruit” and “plants” and accidentally made all fruit and all plants duty-free.
There's a big difference between a small selection of plants that can grow fruit and all the fruit imported into the country plus every plant you can imagine!
Importers saw the loophole, exploited it, and the error cost the government $2 million, which is about $50 million in today's dollars.
Let’s end with one of literature’s most famous messy manuscripts.
When James Joyce’s "Ulysses" was first published in 1922, it was a disaster. Joyce’s handwritten manuscript was nearly illegible, he added nearly 100,000 words to the page proofs, and the French printers didn’t even speak English.
The result was more than 5,000 typos. And they knew it was bad! The first printing actually had an insert that read, "The publisher asks the reader's indulgence for typographical errors unavoidable in the exceptional circumstances."
It wasn’t until the 1980s, when computers made it possible to compare and keep track of the many different versions of the book that had come to exist as people tried to correct it piecemeal, that a team in Germany was able to publish what is believed to be a version that is much more true to Joyce's intended words — after seven years of work and about $300,000 of expenses. And the researchers said at the time that they believed the corrections would actually change how people interpret the book.
So, what’s the takeaway here of all these great stories?
Well, for National Grammar Day, you can remember that grammar matters. Yes, it's about small things — a comma here, a wrong word there. But it can also be about egos, vendettas, dollars, and death.
So, next time someone rolls their eyes when you talk about grammar, just tell them about the guy who got hanged because of a comma.
Finally, instead of a new familect, I'm lifting up one of my recent favorite familects. If you're a regular listener, you'll remember Shari's story about a month ago about how her family asks if you're mad, or if you're Ghost Town mad, after they had a legendary argument at a theme park called Ghost Town. Well, my audio engineer, Dan Feierabend, also loved the story and thought it had musical vibes, and I had just had Lex Friedman on the show, who among many other things, makes songs. So I hired Lex to write and perform a song. You can find Lex at LexFriedman.com. And without further ado, here's "Ghost Town Mad."
Way back in North Carolina,
A brand new term began,
A fight so monumental,
Between a woman and her man,
Dad wanted to visit the Scottish museum,
But mom said oh, no way,
Our four-year-old wouldn’t care for that,
And so we remember to this day,
Are you mad?
Or are you Ghost Town Mad?
It’s the kind of mad that lingers,
Are you mad?
Or are you Ghost Town Mad?
Like your brain’s full of middle fingers,
Some fights fade like denim,
But some are strong as steel,
And on that North Carolina day,
We learned a whole new way to feel,
So darn angry in the parking lot,
There at Ghost Town in the sky,
Yelling and screaming and carrying on,
And thanks to them, that’s why…
We gotta ask:
Are you mad? (Are you mad?)
Or are you Ghost Town Mad?
It’s the kind of mad that endures,
Are you mad? (Are you mad?)
Or are you Ghost Town Mad?
Like anger’s sweating right out your pores,
We’re all mad (We’re all mad),
We’re all Ghost Town Mad,
We’re all mad (We’re all mad),
Yeah, we’re Ghost Town Mad.
The following references for the "grammar drama" segment did not appear in the podcast but are included here for completeness.
Collins, P. Slate. "Has modern life killed the semicolon?" June 20, 2008. https://slate.com/culture/2008/06/has-modern-life-killed-the-semicolon.html (accessed February 25, 2025)
Gwosdek, H. "Lily's Grammar of Latin in English: An Introduction of the Eyght Partes of Speche, and the Construction of the Same." 2013. Oxford University Press. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Lily_s_Grammar_of_Latin_in_English_An_In/pKrfvApk3_4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+%22Grammarians%27+War&pg=PA91&printsec=frontcover (accessed February 25, 2025)
Watson, C. "Semicolon." 2019. HarperCollins.