English grammar and spelling are like manners and customs. There is no single &quot;right&quot; way to be polite but there are things that are commonly accepted by most people to be impolite and therefore &quot;wrong.&quot; It can be hard and confusing. I have a phd in the humanities and I still find myself questioning my grammar or struggling to explain why something a student wrote in a paper is wrong. (I usually fall back on things like &quot;this is unclear&quot; and &quot;it would be more elegant to write something like this...&quot; But like manners or even music, once you have internalized the &quot;rules&quot; you know when you can break them and when you can&#x27;t.<p>Would it be better to have a single official standard English? Maybe but good luck getting all the English-speaking countries to agree on that.