Between you and me (or should that be you and I?) the scandal revealed a conflict of interest among members of congress (or should that be between members of congress?).

Let me start again. This week a national newspaper highlighted a grammar test in which players are challenged to choose the most appropriate word to fill in the blank in a given sentence, with most of the 20 questions focusing on the correct use of 'between' and ‘among’.

Its creator shared the quiz online on Playbuzz, and claimed it is so difficult that just four per cent of people will score full marks. I hesitated before taking it, as, despite my profession, my grammar is appalling.

My husband, who was educated at one of those English prep schools that looks like a National Trust property, constantly berates me for not using the correct grammar.

He spouts on and on about past participles, conjunctions and definite articles and often tells me off for 'ending a sentence on a preposition'. He remembers the words of Winston Churchill: ‘Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.’

At his stately home school grammar was force fed. Like fois gras geese, the boys digested the inner workings of nouns, verbs, adjectives and the like. Anyone who used a split infinitive was pegged out in the back quad and caned 1000 times. Well, maybe I slightly exaggerate the punishment, but he certainly learned his stuff.

In contrast, my grammatical education was sorely lacking. I don’t remember any at primary school, and very little at secondary. The only things that appear to have stuck in my brain are that nouns are names, verbs are doing words and adjectives are describing words.

“Do you mean a noun or a proper noun?” asked my husband when I checked with him as to whether even that was correct. He explained the difference, then told me about pronouns.

It seems I have a lot to learn. I’m a native speaker - English as a foreign language must be nightmarish.

I still get confused over ‘it’s’ and ‘its’, and ‘me’ and ‘I’. Even the Queen gets it wrong, saying ‘My husband and I’ when she should be using ‘me.’

The split infinitive is as hard to get your head around as the offside rule. The only way I can understand it is to repeat to myself what is said to be the worst example - the introductory words to Star Trek: ‘To boldly go where no man has gone before.’

I know it should be ‘to go boldly’, but I haven’t a clue why.

Early 19th century author John Comly is the first known writer to issue a ban on the split, saying that: “An adverb should not be placed between a verb of the infinitive mood and the preposition ‘to’ which governs it.’

Now, however, researchers say there is good reason to consign the rule to history. A survey by Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press concluded split infinitives are now nearly three times as common in British speech as in the early 1990s.

"Language teaching should reflect these changes,” they concluded.

So, when I took the grammar test, I expected to fail miserably. To my surprise, I found it quite easy, and it came as an even greater shock when I achieved the maximum score of 20.

Grammatical numbskull I may be, but I know my ‘between’ and ‘among’.