The case of an august part of old English grammar being regarded as a vulgar American import is an odd one. Writers of usage guides have tended to be a conservative lot.

Geoff Pullum’s heart sinks as he finds that a guide to English grammar once again simply regurgitates useless 200-year-old platitudes.

→ How America saved old-fashioned English grammar; From the October 19th 2019 edition. Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents.

Ellen Jovin is not the grammar police. She's more like a grammar guru, a gentle, nonjudgmental guide who knows English isn't etched into a linguistic stone, rigid and unchangeable. Instead, she ...

Bruce Mitchell, An Invitation to Old English and Anglo Saxon England (Oxford, 1995) B. Mitchell and F. C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English, 6th edn (Oxford, 2001) – more detailed and challenging if ...

Nowhere in Old English grammar is there actually a precise ancestor for ‘the’. But some time over the 1100s it entered our language. Men say ‘the’ significantly more frequently than women.