A historical or An historical?

[Liar]

There is no Pope of Grammar. There is no High Council On What Is Right (except in France.)

And loads of other places. From what I've learned, English, along with Nordic languages (except New Norweigan), are the only European languages that has not, at one point, had it's grammar decided by committee. So for us it's all deconstruction and description of it's use, not a set of rules.

 

[BlackShanglan]

There is no Pope of Grammar. There is no High Council On What Is Right (except in France.) There are authorities whose opinions we value but they ofte disagree, which is why oganizations involved in writing all have their own style books. The final decision on matters of grammar is pretty much made by consensus and your editor, and iltimately by the person who's paying to do the printing.

Entirely agreed, despite the very generous attempts of Huckleman and English Lady to elect me to the position. On a single sample issue alone - that of the use of commas when joining independent clauses with coordinating conjunctions - it is impossible to extract an agreement from the most basic and authoritative texts available. The "pure grammar" books will generally tell you to use a comma every time, but waffle on the issue of "very short" clauses, in which case you might or might not drop the comma, but you'd generally be all right using one except when you're not. Very helpful. Strunk and White and other "style" handbooks will then sail in with the position that one may add a comma when so joining independent clauses, but that one need not and often should not. Lock all of the editors in a small box for a few days and you'd probably get quite a bloodbath, but not an agreement on any absolute rule for that or many other grammatical gray areas - ending sentences with prepositions, using "their" as a pronoun when the antecedent is an indefinite pronoun, the dreaded question of comma usage after a list and before "and" when what follows "and" is part of the list, comma usage with introductory prepositional phrases, etc., etc., etc.

In the end, the answer is as Dr. M suggests, and also very much like the answer to citation questions. While one might be taught MLA or Chicago or APA documentation style, the final answer to the question "How shall I cite this?" is inevitably "To whom are you sending it?" - or, depending on the speaker's choice of grammatical convention, "Who are you sending it to?"

Shanglan