You can, of course. That headline was pure clickbait. And it worked! My blog now has a new follower. I wonder if he’ll ever meet the other one?
But anyway, where did this you-can’t-start-a-sentence-with-and thing come from? We’re all pretty sure it was a teacher who first laid down this particular law, but where did THEY get it from?
That’s easy. They got it from you. From when you were in junior school. *cue shimmery effect*
You’ve been asked to write a composition about what you did on your school holidays. Cool, your seven-year-old self thinks. There’s loads to write about there! So, head resting on bent left arm, your right hand inexpertly manipulating a 2B pencil and your tongue half-protruding from your pre-pubescent lips, off you go. ‘I went to Spain with my mummy and daddy and I was aloud to stay up late and I saw lots of stars and we had brekfast by the poool where I dropped my camara and daddy got cross and then we went to Aunty Julias’ house in Door Set and…’ And so on, and on.
Your teacher looks at your essay and says how interesting your holiday sounds, but it would read better if you split the story into more than one sentence. So, with playtime rapidly approaching, you do something you think is dead smart. You sprinkle a few full stops here and there. They seem to work best when they precede an ‘and’. Then you remember that a sentence always begins with a capital letter, so gripping your pencil firmly you turn the lower-case ‘a’s into upper-case ‘A’s. There. No wonder English is your favourite subject.
I’m not having that, thinks the teacher. That’s just too easy. I’ll show them. She thinks for a moment. “This is better,” she says. “But you can’t start a sentence with ‘and’. Write it out again.”
*cue shimmers*
So there we have it. We’re all to blame, us and our anything-for-an-easy-school-life ways. Of course, once ‘And’ was forbidden from ever leading a sentence, other poor conjunctions were doomed to suffer the same fate.
If only your seven-year-old self was smart enough to say ‘But Miss, there’s an ‘and’ at the beginning of that hymn we sing!”
“I don’t think so!”
“There is, Miss, there is! *sings* And did those feet, in ancient times…”
BraveNewMalden 