A few decades ago I, like every other college freshman in America, bought a copy of The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. With all the certainty of youth, I leafed through the book and quickly decided that everything in it was either obvious or wrong. This annoyed me so much that I resolved to write a reply called “Strunk and White Are Full of Sh**.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t decide whether the verb should be “Are” or “Is,” and the project died of indecision. (You don’t look too disappointed.)

In those days, Americans were under the sway of popular grammarians, most notably William Safire (moonlighting from his political writing). These style oracles debated hot-button issues such as “hopefully” (a proper equivalent to “one hopes”? nah), “presently” (a legit synonym for “currently”? sure), and “please RSVP” (redundant? yes but who cares?). Today, a grammarian is someone who writes a column reassuring readers that it’s okay to split an infinitive — the linguistic version of Cosmopolitan’s “It’s O.K.” column for those who follow the questionable practice of taking life advice from magazine editors.

Today’s English-grammar books are meant mainly as breezy guides to clear writing, but in the 18th and 19th centuries, a “grammar” was a formal textbook for improving one’s English, usually with the goal of helping the reader get by in polite society. Typically it set forth the rudiments of grammar (sometimes reaching back to Latin and Greek) and began with a preface that explained why the book was necessary, or why the author’s list of irregular verbs was arranged more logically than everyone else’s. For a century and a half these grammars were best sellers — partly because, like Strunk and White, they were routinely assigned in schools. Bryan A. Garner, National Review’s language columnist, has collected 100 grammars from the genre’s heyday, and while you might think that scanning one or two would suffice to give you the general idea of the rest (and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong), there are endearing or amusing features in almost every one.

(Garner’s book also provides a useful example of recursiveness. A grammar consists of writing about writing, which means that Garner’s book is writing about writing about writing. So the review you’re reading is writing about writing about writing about writing, and if Katherine Howell, our indispensable literary editor, sends some comments on my draft, it will be writing about writing about writing about writing about writing, and at that point, the universe will have no choice but to implode upon itself. Thank goodness Katherine is careful about things like that.)

In any event, the works covered in Taming the Tongue purported to set forth the rules and principles a student needed to grasp to speak and write the language properly, and these rules were not always cut and dried. From the mists of 1745, Ann Fisher (most grammarians were men, as you’d expect, but a handful were women, mostly schoolmistresses) weighs in on a debate that we’re still hashing out: “The Masculine Person answers to the general Name, which comprehends both Male and Female; as, Any Person who knows what he says, &c.”

On occasion, they still challenge us to reconsider our received notions. For example: How did “your” get to be a pronoun? More of an adjective, isn’t it? And what about interjections? Are they really a part of speech? As William Stevens Balch pointed out in 1838, your dog can interrupt a conversation, but that doesn’t mean he’s talking: “Interjections . . . form no part of language, but may be used by beasts and birds as well as by men.” (Parts of speech were a constant point of contention, and the books Garner has collected display a striking lack of uniformity in counting how many there are. People often assume that the number is ordained by nature, but in fact it varies in these grammars from two to a whopping 30, though most authors chose figures in the eight-to-ten range.)

Other authors include the chemist Joseph Priestley and one Peter Jamieson, whose 1847 A Rhyming Grammar of the English Language laid down its linguistic principles in rather shaky couplets (“Auxiliary verbs are those by help of which / The English verbs are conjugated each”). Most grammars included illustrations, often humorous cartoons. One is illustrated with a panorama containing pictorial renderings of 30 prepositions, like a linguistic Hieronymus Bosch painting. Elsewhere, Garner identifies the originator of the now-discredited stricture against split infinitives (John Comly, 1803). (Endorsing split infinitives was a favorite of 1970s–80s language writers; a way to disavow extremism, like a political writer today saying, “I’m no Trump fan, but . . .”) The scholars who wrote these works often turned out to be Twitter-level combative, fighting each other with an intensity matched only by National Review proofreaders wrangling over a comma. Their disputes could quickly get out of hand: Noah Webster, for example, was a notoriously argumentative grump. Garner contributes historical summaries for each author, usually a single page, and for some reason he narrates them in the present tense: “A native of Dover, Delaware, Miller studies at the University of Pennsylvania and is ordained in the Presbyterian ministry in 1793.” Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.

Garner’s book reminds us that grammar, like clothing, has long been a class signifier. Accents and slang used to be the quickest way to separate the plebs from the toffs; nowadays it’s pronouns. I saw my first occurrence of “themself” the other day and blinked to make sure it wasn’t a typo, but by the time you read this, it will probably be standard (my computer autocorrects “themself” to “themselves,” but that’s too old-fashioned to last very long).

Above all, Garner deserves congratulations for making grammars interesting in a world where dictionaries get most of the publicity. To a philologist, reading a dictionary is like eating a bowl of Lucky Charms: There’s something sweet in almost every bite. Grammars are more like oatmeal, comforting and nourishing and not necessarily bland, and with Garner’s assistance, we can see that language was just as much of a battleground centuries ago as it is today.