As someone who went through pretty good schools sixty years ago, I was exposed, to say the least, to the precepts of good speech. I was comfortable with most of them, but I never regarded “grammar” as a respectable authority. Brandishing rulebooks allegedly handed down from on high is an awful waste of time with a language whose history consists more of infection than of evolution. Speakers of many North Atlantic languages had a hand in its formation up to the Eleventh Century, and then there were two very strong shots of Latin, first in the form of French, with the Norman Conquest, and later with the classicizing influence of Latin itself, from the Seventeenth Century up until a little over a century ago. Dovetailing with this last infusion was the ongoing mongrelizing of American English, which on a bad day at Notre Dame in Indiana used to make me think of one of the less attractive Low German dialects (to which I would prefer Nederlands). English is a language for which there is no “on high.”

Nonetheless, attentive speakers seem to discriminate right from wrong easily enough. They are guided, I have come to believe, by a simple principle that I call “agreement.” To be honest, I learned this term from the study of French, a gendered language in which articles and pronounces must “agree” with the gender of the nouns that they modify. And with the number, too: mon bon ami a trop de bonnes amies. English does without these niceties, on the whole, but they are hardly unknown. Consider the trouble caused by the formulation, dating to a time when education was a male preserve, “Does everyone have his book?” There is a feeling — or there was — that singular “everyone” cannot have a book that is “theirs.” (Those who want to regard “everyone” as effectively plural ought to take up saying “Everyone want an iPhone” and see how that works for them at job interviews.) Whatever your views on this conundrum, you must  acknowledge that the social change that has made the use of “his” as a default pronoun for mixed groups, as it was when I was growing up, unacceptable has wrought plenty of ruckus, even though the ugly party-line barbarism has achieved a certain respectability. Evidently, there are not enough serious general readers to fill even those editorial positions that still pay a living wage.

That was my conclusion the other day when I read an interesting piece by Alma Guillermoprieto about Joseph Pilates. As one would expect from Guillermoprieto, the review was generally well-written, but I was alarmed to read, more than once, that Pilates “immigrated to” America.

English has long offered a pair of variants on “migrate.” “immigrate” and “emigrate.” The prefixes of these variants and their corresponding nouns respectively mean “in” and “out,” or “to” and “from.” We speak of the emigrants who left Ireland during the potato famine to become American immigrants. I don’t think that anybody would slip so much as to speak of the United States is “a land of emigrants” — although, very technically, it is, since almost all its citizens are former emigrants, having left somewhere else, or their descendants. But the point is that “emigrate” and “immigrate” are reciprocal verbs. For every emigrant (from somewhere) there is an immigrant (to somewhere else). The only exceptions are those unfortunate emigrants who perish in transit.

Go ahead and overlook this carelessness in a prestigious journal with the assurance that “everybody knows what Guillermoprieto means.” True for the time being, perhaps. But the lack of agreement opens cracks through which spreads the kudzu of uncertainty and, ultimately, meaninglessness. And, to the attentive ear, it will not sound right.