If you’ve ever been corrected for using “who” instead of “whom”, or for splitting an infinitive, you’ve encountered a peculiar feature of language: the idea of “correctness”. We tend to think of grammar and spelling rules as timeless, unshakable laws. But the truth is, these rules are a relatively recent invention, forged in the fires of technology, nationalism, and social ambition. The story of how our languages became “corrected” is a fascinating journey from beautiful chaos to prescriptive order.

Before the Rules: The Beautiful Chaos of Manuscripts

Travel back to medieval England, and you wouldn’t find a dictionary on a scribe’s desk. Spelling was largely phonetic and deeply personal. A scribe in Yorkshire would write words differently from one in Kent because they spoke differently. The goal wasn’t to adhere to a universal standard, but to capture the sound of the word as they knew it.

Consider a simple word like “through”. In various Old and Middle English texts, you might find it spelled as þurh, thorgh, thourgh, thruch, or threw. None of these were “wrong”; they were simply regional or individual variants. This linguistic diversity was the norm. Language was a flowing river, not a perfectly manicured canal.

The Game Changer: The Printing Press and a Common Tongue

The first great standardizing force was not a person, but a machine. When William Caxton set up England’s first printing press in 1476, he faced a business decision. To sell books to the widest possible audience, he needed to pick one dialect and stick with it. Printing was expensive, and it was far more efficient to set the type once than to accommodate every regional spelling.

Caxton chose the dialect of London—the center of commerce, politics, and law. This “Chancery Standard” became the foundation for printed English. Suddenly, one version of the language had an immense technological and economic advantage. As books and pamphlets proliferated, the London dialect was elevated from a regional variant to a prestige standard. For the first time, people across the country were reading the same words spelled the same way. The first seeds of “correct” English had been sown.

The Age of Academies and Dictionaries

By the 17th and 18th centuries, the Enlightenment’s passion for reason, order, and classification was in full swing. Intellectuals looked at the “messiness” of English with disdain. They wanted to “fix”, “purify”, and “ascertain” the language, protecting it from the perceived corruption of common usage.

In France, this impulse led to the creation of the Académie française in 1635, a national body tasked with guarding the French language. In England, influential figures like Jonathan Swift argued for a similar academy, though one was never officially established. Instead, the task of codifying English fell to individuals: the dictionary-makers and grammarians.

The towering figure of this era is Samuel Johnson. His A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was a monumental achievement. It wasn’t the first English dictionary, but it was the most ambitious. Johnson didn’t just list words; he provided definitions, etymologies, and—crucially—literary quotations from writers he considered masters of the language, like Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. By doing so, he cemented the idea that “correct” English was the English of great literature. This was the birth of modern prescriptivism: the belief that there is a right and wrong way to use language, and that rules should be prescribed to enforce it.

Language as a National Project: The Case of Noah Webster

Nowhere is the link between language standardization and national identity clearer than in the United States. After the American Revolution, the fledgling nation was keen to distinguish itself from its former British ruler. One of the most passionate advocates for a unique American culture was Noah Webster.

Webster believed that an independent nation required an independent language. He saw linguistic reform as a political and patriotic act. His famous An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) deliberately introduced spellings that differed from the British standard. His goal was to make the language more rational, streamlined, and distinctly American.

This is why Americans write:

• -or instead of -our (color, honor)
• -er instead of -re (center, theater)
• -ize instead of -ise (organize, realize)

Webster’s dictionary was a declaration of linguistic independence. It demonstrated that “correctness” could be a tool to build a nation and forge a new identity.

The Digital Wild West: Who Makes the Rules Now?

For centuries, the rules of language were handed down from above—from academies, dictionary editors, and schoolteachers. But the internet has changed the game. Today, linguistic innovation is bubbling up from below at an unprecedented speed.

Think about it. New words and phrases (rizz, doomscrolling, chief character energy) can go viral and enter the lexicon in months, not decades. The singular “they”, long used in speech but condemned by prescriptivists, gained widespread acceptance largely through online discourse before being named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2019. Punctuation is evolving, too; the period can seem aggressive in a text message, while emoji and reaction GIFs carry complex emotional weight.

This raises the ultimate question: in the age of the internet, who gets to decide what’s right?

The answer is more complicated than ever. Authoritative sources like the Associated Press Stylebook or the Oxford English Dictionary still hold sway in formal contexts. However, they now operate more as descriptivists—observing and recording how language is actually being used, rather than just prescribing how it should be used. The true authority is becoming more distributed. It lies in the collective usage of billions of people texting, tweeting, and creating content every day.

The story of language “correction” shows us that the rules we learn are not natural laws. They are artifacts of history, shaped by technology, power, and culture. And while the printed standard gave us a common ground for centuries, the digital age is returning us, in a way, to a more fluid and chaotic state—a world where we are all, collectively, the scribes shaping the language of tomorrow.