Even as people of my vintage have a little smirk of pleasure at the news that grammar will once again be taught in primary and secondary English classes, we should recognise that the enterprise is fraught with peril, and from our side (the pro-grammar people) as much as from those defiant about the fact that they were never taught any.
A nice example of the fifth columnists in our midst, and the sort of damage that they can do, is Wilson Tuckey, who thinks that he was taught grammar at Perth Modern during the late 1940s. In Parliament the other day, he was welcoming the return to grammar, and added, ''It has been totally forgotten that you do not finish a sentence with a preposition ... I would advise them not to read our newspapers for enlightenment.''
Annabel Crabb, of the Sydney Morning Herald, who is a wordsmith of the highest calibre even if she is plainly too young to have been formally taught grammar, dealt unkindly with Tuckey, who, she said, had ''the verbal skills of the average pub galah''.
I do not doubt that Tuckey was taught not to end a sentence with a preposition. He was probably told, also, that split infinitives were always wrong, that one should never start a sentence with ''and'' or ''but''. That ''than'' and ''as'' are not prepositions, followed by a noun or pronoun in the objective case, but are generally followed by a noun in the nominative case, governed by a verb implied or understood.
With lots of other stuff about when and where the subjunctive was essential, and the finer refinements of ''who'', ''whose'' and whom''. And, no doubt, a host of other pedantic things, not so much about grammar as about the real, instead of the imagined, meaning of words such enormity, prestigious and refute.
For many of us, indeed, it is by the strictest adherence to such rules that we judge a person to be educated. Or a newspaper to be illiterate.
I was taught many such rules myself. Many of them stick because they were taught as inflexible rules, with use of a stick. I still have red marks on my knuckles from a teacher's rapping them with a ruler as she recited '''that' must never be used as an adverb of degree'' in fifth grade, about 46 years ago.
At least she was right about that. Many of the other rules she taught me, like many of the rules that seem to have permeated the Tuckey brain were never rules of English grammar. Not ever. Even in the 1940s, or even in the 1840s. Certainly not now. The preposition ''rule'' was obviously posited by someone, but cannot be deduced from the great writers (certainly not Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Milton, Johnson, Austen or Dickens, all of whom ended sentences with prepositions). Recognised authorities on grammar and usage - Fowler and Partridge, for example - firmly deny the existence of such a rule. Famously, of course, when someone dared correct Churchill's prose for supposed breach of the rule, he said that it was an ''impertinence, up with which I shall not put''.
Likewise, a split infinitive can sound infelicitous, a good reason to avoid it. But it is not and has never been regarded by the best grammarians as wrong in principle. Despite what our school teachers said.
Heaven knows who taught them that they were rules, let alone inflexible rules, but it was not the best authorities. In any event one of the best authorities, Eric Blair, once wrote a broad list of sound rules of good writing, finishing up, however, with advice to ''break any of these rules rules rather than say anything barbarous''.
Some people act as though the rules of grammar and the laws of Syntax were somehow adopted by Parliament. Or perhaps the Academy Anglaise. One of my favourite grammar books actually has the Laws of Syntax, in numbered order, exactly as though they sat alongside Magna Carta, and that all authorities had agreed not only about their content and phrasing but their order.
Though they are mostly common sense to any normally literate person, even their expression these days would require some constant running explanation to a younger person. Law 1, for example, says that ''a verb must agree with its nominative in person and order''. Law II that ''transitive verbs in the active voice (as well as their participles and gerunds) govern nouns and persons in the objective case.'' Law IX: ''When two or more nominatives of different person are connected by and, the verb will agree with the first person rather than with the second and with the second rather than the third person.''
My favourite: ''The relative is nominative to the verb when no other nominative comes between it and the verb, but if a nominative intervenes the relative is in the objective case.'' Even the purist might be slow to appreciate that this is the law that sets the ''who-whom'' rule.
Not only are many of the technical terms of art now unfamiliar, but there are easier ways of showing the principles to an ordinarily literate child. One learns, say, the significance of the word ''only'' for example, better by inviting people to compare the meanings of the phrase ''the cat sat on the mat'' with only in difference places, than by composing some rule for a Wilson Tuckey to understand.
We must remember that we want a grammar of today, not of the 1940s and 1950s. Some battles have moved on, and the rules have changed, if ever they were rules. There are more important battles than fighting for the subjunctive voice, or the 10,000 uninteresting things about gerundives we once had to know.
Please do not frighten off our teachers, most of whom will have to learn it themselves before they have to pass it on.