You were lucky. In my day, we were still being taught that the grammar of Latin somehow applied to English. There is a species of English usage that can make a

You were lucky. In my day, we were still being taught that the grammar of Latin somehow applied to English. There is a species of English usage that can make a certain sense as English, but which more or less follows rules that can be applied when learning Latin or Greek. That set of rules was taught in schools for a couple of centuries because the aim was to teach the student Latin at least, and perhaps Greek. Somewhere along the way, people who had been taught that system began to believe that this Latinised English represented proper English grammar. It's only recently that the educational consensus has become, "well, that's a load of old bollocks." The first comprehensive descriptive grammar of the actual English language wasn't published until 2002 (The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language).