Welcome to the Saturday edition of The Conversation U.S.’s Daily newsletter.

As editors, it’s our job to be sticklers about grammar. Sure, it’s important for us to spot dangling modifiers and ensure subject-verb agreements. But many rules for speech and writing that appear hard and fast, such as never ending a sentence with a preposition, are malleable.

As linguist Valerie M. Fridland explains in her new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” many of the rules we know today emerged only a couple of centuries ago, with the rise of a new figure – or menace, depending on your view: the grammarian.

With literacy rates soaring in the 18th century, grammarians sought to firm up certain rules for written and spoken English, and usage guides and dictionaries proliferated. But there was always going to be a strain of futility to their work, thanks to a tension inherent to language: It’s always evolving. For all the consternation over speakers dropping the “g” at the end of “working,” there was a time when the “k” in “know” was pronounced, before it fell out of favor in the 15th century.

“If people learned to look at language more like linguists,” Fridland writes, “they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.”

And, yes, that’s a sentence that ends with a preposition.

This week we also liked stories about how boys and girls are equally social at birth, the potential of air filters to improve cognitive health, and, now a day before the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, a story on how radiation travels through the environment.

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