There is nothing wrong in English with splitting an infinitive. There never was anything wrong with it, either. You probably all knew that already. Unfortunately, the loudest grammar snobs are the ones who’ve put the least research into their opinions, and so, for every ten people quietly aware that infinitives can and sometimes should be split, there’s one vocal grammaticaster shouting over them that split infinitives are an abomination in the eyes of Pope. That means that there’re still a substantial number of people out there either objecting to or grinding their teeth over Star Trek’s to boldly go.
These people are mistaken. But the fact that they are mistaken will not stop them from complaining and possibly thinking less of you. And you may very well be in a position where the opinion of the misinformed matters to you; you might be an author, editor, or even a job applicant whose cover letter will be read by a lunkhead whose personal grammatical prejudices may blind him to your outstanding qualities. This leads a large number of people aware that there is no linguistic reason to avoid split infinitives (or singular they, or sentential hopefully, etc.) to still avoid using them for fear that someone of some importance will judge them harshly. It’s an unfortunate state of affairs, best summarized by Ann Daingerfield & Arnold Zwicky’s line: “Crazies win“.
Now, in many cases, it’s not so bad. It’s unfortunate that reasonable people have to bow to the whims of the mad, but that’s life, innit? After all, would you really notice if someone changed (1a) to (1b)?
(1a) I’m going to angrily split infinitives.
(1b) I’m going to split infinitives angrily.
And sometimes it even sounds better to not split an infinitive:
(2a) Alfonso Ribeiro taught me to gracefully dance.
(2b) Alfonso Ribeiro taught me to dance gracefully.
But these bad-to-split situations are not as pervasive as some people seem to think. That’s because prescriptivists have a bad habit of not actually looking at the language that they’re claiming domain over. For example, the normally reasonable folks at AskOxford write that “Split infinitives are frequently poor style, but they are not strictly bad grammar,” and illustrate this claim with exactly zero examples. In so doing, they completely ignore the fact that sometimes the split infinitive is the only right way of doing it. For example, consider
(3a) She decided to gradually get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3b) She decided gradually to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3c) She decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected gradually.
(3d) She decided to get gradually rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3e) She decided to get rid gradually of the teddy bears she had collected.
(3f) She decided to get rid of gradually the teddy bears she had collected.
This is an example from R. L. Trask. (3b) and (3c) unsplit the infinitive, but make it unclear where gradually is attached; is she gradually getting rid of the bears, gradually deciding to get rid of them, or getting rid of bears collected gradually? And (3d), (3e), and (3f) are just plain awkward, so if someone thinks a split infinitive is poor style, surely they’d think these ones still worse. A reasonable person might avoid split infinitives in other situations, so as not to incur the wrath of idiots, but in cases like this, no one would intentionally ruin their sentence in order to placate the misinformed.
Or so I’d figured. But then Amy McDaniel posted a worksheet from a class taught by David Foster Wallace, who very well may have been a talented writer, but also held some severely backward prescriptivist views, as discussed/destroyed at Language Hat. The worksheet is a list of sentences, each of which Wallace claims contains an error. One of the sentences is:
8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.
Now, in light of all this discussion about split infinitives, it’s clear that Wallace’s objection will be to the phrase to ever stop. But how do you fix it? The answer, given by McDaniel in the comments on the post, may surprise you:
the easy, unawkward fix, according to Wallace, is “She didn’t seem ever to stop talking.”
I don’t often use interrobangs, but: WHAT?! I could see “She didn’t ever seem to stop talking.” I could see “She didn’t seem to stop talking, ever.” Heck, I think I might even prefer one of those to the original. If you’re willing to change the words, you could also use: “She never seemed to stop talking.”; “It seemed she never stopped talking.”; “She seemingly never stopped talking.” Any of those would be reasonable, unawkward replacements.
But “She didn’t seem ever to stop talking”? Does anyone find to be that a good sentence, or even an “unawkward” one? It sounds awful to me, but then, being from Pittsburgh, I’m not entirely standard in my usage of negative polarity items like ever or anymore. If you like this sentence, please say so.
This is the weird thing with this worksheet: Wallace was a well-renowned writer, as well as a native speaker of English. How can someone so close to the language be so blind to what does and doesn’t sound like English? Because his re-phrased sentence most certainly does not.
Please, dear reader, I beg of you. Don’t let fear of what other people will say about your writing cause you to write something obviously awkward. And if you should disregard my plea, at least don’t pull a David Foster Wallace and convince people who respect you to fly in the face of all that sounds right in English.
[Hat tip to bradshaw of the future for pushing me to finish this post.]
—
Wallace’s other sentence revisions have already been intelligently discussed (attacked) in many other blogs, among them Arnold Zwicky’s discussion of each other and one another, Chris Potts’s succinct dismissal at Language Log, the truly stunning point-by-point gutting of the test delivered at Mackerel Economics, and another equally stunning point-by-point evisceration from Starlingford Chronicles. I highly recommend you check these out.
Motivated Grammar 
32 comments
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December 20, 2009 at 8:54 am
poettraveler
An excellent ‘dissertation’. Thank you for sharing it.
For myself – I love language, expression, narrative and all the components that go into creating something that ‘reaches out, in some way, to reader(s).
Imagination, inspiration, curiosity, are a few of the things that help towards giving birth to ‘good’ creative writing. Reading widely is, I suggest, also a key element along the way
When one takes a positive view there is no end to the ‘learning curve’. I have been learning for several decades now.
I enjoyed your post. Thanks again.
:)
December 20, 2009 at 12:31 pm
John Cowan
The people who express this opinion about split infinitives should simply be taken in back of the barn and shot. There used to be people who believed that the words breast and leg were unfit for use, any use, in writing or polite speech. (The phrases white meat and dark meat in reference to poultry are a survival of this.) These people were taken in back of the barn and shot — in the breast, not the leg. Then the rest of us got to resume the use of our own language in peace.
The best way to counter a mindless, arbitrary prescription is with another mindless, arbitrary prescription. In this case: “The rule against splitting infinitives is incorrect, and from now on people who object to split infinitives will be taken in back of the …” You get the idea. Have a Merry Christmas (in back of the barn) and a happy and peaceful New Year.
In the meantime, I’d like a new desk set for Christmas, please, with a pen, a mechanical pencil, and a small tomahawk for splitting infinitives and for doing execution when the shotgun ammo runs out.
December 20, 2009 at 6:23 pm
starlingford
It’s always nice to get pingbacks, but it’s very flattering indeed to have a post described as a ‘stunning evisceration’. You made my day – thank you very much!
Regards,
Gavin
December 20, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Vance Maverick
DFW was indeed talented, but his style has a tropism, hypertropism really, to the awkward. In his fiction and general nonfiction, even apart from these prescriptivist pieces, his love of his language was bureaucratic, ingrown, and pedantic — exuberantly so, to be sure, but more so than I can enjoy in the long run.
(And to see how this links to other sides of his life, check out the comment from Rosemarie DiMatteo on the Language Hat post.)
December 20, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Vance Maverick
I guess I was going for “hypertrophy”, there, but “hypertrophism” is not to be disavowed.
December 21, 2009 at 8:26 am
Hissy
Could you be more pedantic? It took you three paragraphs to get to the point with all your redundant bitching about how some evil third party is evil. Or is redundance prescriptive in your world?
December 21, 2009 at 9:39 am
David
Great post, and great blog! William Safire always advised to never split an infinitive.
December 21, 2009 at 10:52 am
Apostropartheid
The sentence you take such exception to doesn’t sound too intolerable to me–slightly jarring, but not enough to warrant exclamation. I’m a UK speaker, though.
Otherwise, brilliant post. Bookmarked.
December 21, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Karan
Maybe I’ve grown up with more British-style English but Wallace’s sentence doesn’t sound that awkward to me, though I still wouldn’t recommend it over the original.
December 21, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Cody Brimhall
Strange day indeed. I woke up this morning from a dream in which I was beset by prescriptivist crazies shouting at me about my use of split infinitives; then I saw that ThatWhichMatter (http://thatwhichmatter.tumblr.com/) linked to this essay. And THEN I saw who wrote it, a gentleman in my very own department at UCSD! Such a small world! (Actually, in terms of casually enjoying thoughtful 1,000-word posts about grammatical prescriptivism, yes, it probably is…).
Great post, gonna go read some others.
December 21, 2009 at 9:04 pm
ulyssesmsu
Hissy has a typical uninformed reaction–more worried about Gabe’s being than about the issue being discussed, for crying out loud! NO ONE, and I do mean NO ONE, has been more PEDAN-frigging-TIC than the uninformed IDIOTS who have been telling us for 200 years that we MUST NOT split infinitives!
How’s THAT for pedantic!?
December 21, 2009 at 9:07 pm
ulyssesmsu
That was supposed to say, “. . . about Gabe’s being pedantic . . . “–and I put “pedantic” in brackets to emphasize it, but when you do that, the whole thing disappears.
Dumbass!
December 22, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Jesse S.
I posted a response on another blog about this, but I have to chime in here too. Wallace was teaching a class on writing and he wanted his students to know the rules (arbitrary though they are). His point was that if you can follow the (arbitrary) rules then the highly-educated reader – who also knows the rules – will not be distracted by any broken (arbitrary) rules. I would hazard a guess that the majority of people who know the split-infinitive rule are probably pedantic in its use, as opposed to knowing the rule, but not really caring if it’s followed or not. Wallace was just trying to teach the students the rules so that they don’t break them out of ignorance, but out of artistic necessity. I don’t see how this makes him an “idiot”. He’s not walking around correcting the public at large, just the students that he is paid to teach. And I know that he hasn’t done the “least research” into the split-infinitive rule, he just came to a different conclusion than you regarding the eloquonce of the sentence used in the example. And he is considered on of the best writers of his generation, so maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt in terms of his literary aesthetics. Anyways, I’ve read some of these blogs about this quiz and most of them seem just as strident as any prescriptivist text I’ve read. Wallace just wanted his students to know the rules and have valid reasons for breaking them. Of course these rules are all made up, but so are spelling conventions and yet, we don’t get all upset when teachers make students spell words “correctly” and mark them wrong when they “mispell” words.
December 22, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Bill S.
The “ever to stop talking” variant doesn’t sound bad to me — but then, that may be a function of my having read an awful lot of prose written by people nervously dodging split infinitives. There’s bound to be an inverse correlation between how often you’ve seen/heard something and how awkward it seems.
December 22, 2009 at 2:34 pm
goofy
Jesse S: The thing is, Wallace doesn’t say that you shouldn’t break these arbitrary rules so that pedantic readers won’t be distracted by your broken arbitrary rules. He says (at least according to Amy McDaniel’s post) that these rules are the “current conventions of Standard Written English”, and knowing these conventions will help us avoid ambiguity.
But most of the rules given in this quiz, including the no split infinitives rule, have nothing to do with the conventions of Standard Written English.
December 23, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Alex
… ever to V … sounds pretty ethnic to me. and by that I mean i associate it with the English (and Scottish) way of talking English. I heard it several times during my short stint in the UK.
December 23, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Daniel
Jesse S.:
Wallace’s point was not, as you say, that if you can follow the rules then the highly-educated reader will not be distracted by the rules. His point — and he states this point blank — is that these clauses are in need of “repair”; indeed, they are in such need of repair that if you haven’t been taught how to do it, you have grounds for legal restitution. Had he considered the rules to be arbitrary, it is highly unlikely that he would have worded things so strongly. Furthermore, there was no indication that he wanted them broken only “out of artistic necessity”. It seems clear that he wanted these “rules” without fail.
But ten times more important is the fact that this was a writing class, which means that when his students were finished they should have been better writers than when they started. That means that the “corrections” he gives need to be better alternatives than the “damaged” versions. In the case of the split-inifitive example, I can come up with half a dozen better alternatives* than the one he provides, each of which obeys this non-existent “rule”. I can also provide a seventh alternative which does break the “rule”; the seventh way is to leave the sentence alone, which sounds better than his correction.
As for your comment about spelling conventions, you are correct that we don’t get upset when teachers correct students’ incorrect spellings…if that is in fact what they are doing. We also don’t get upset when teachers correct grammar usages which are indisputably incorrect, such as “You gave I a cold!” We do, however, get upset when a teacher either a) replaces one acceptable spelling of a word with another acceptable spelling (e.g., “dialog” and “dialogue”) and calls the replacement a “correction”, b) takes a properly spelled word and “corrects” it to an indisputably wrong spelling, or c) points out that an indisputably incorrect spelling is incorrect, but offers a “correction” which is equally incorrect. The split-infinitive “correction” is much more analogous to one of these three situations than to replacing an indisputably incorrect spelling with an indisputably correct one.
* To wit:
1. She didn’t ever seem to stop talking.
2. She never seemed to stop talking.
3. She always seemed to be talking.
4. It seemed like she never stopped talking.
5. She seemed to talk non-stop.
6. She just wouldn’t shut up.
My personal preference, depending on the formality of the situation, would be either #2 or #6.
December 23, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Jesse S.
Goofy and Daniel points all well taken. Also I appreciate the even-handed tone that seemed lacking in some of the other blogs about this quiz. So the rules he was enforcing or trying to teach are viewed as not being consistently followed enough to require a student of writing to learn? Should these rules not be taught, or should they be taught but with the caveat, that some people consider the rule to be flimsy and unsupportable? And with regards to spelling, the reason we have consistent spelling now is because at some point in the past someone made an arbitrary decision regarding the spelling of certain words. And if a variant spelling were to cause confusion or create angst in a reader, why not avoid it altogether. Or if you don’t want to avoid it you should at least know what the “correct” spelling is. Here are Wallace’s exact words: “IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING…”. He is saying someone should have taught them how to fix these sentences OR avoid them altogether by rewording them. The crime is when people make these mistakes out of complete ignorance, not that they know the rules but have an arguable reason for breaking them. Wallace’s editor said that when Wallace broke a grammatical rule he always had a logical or artistic reason for breaking it. So he wasn’t some pedant who advocated strickly adhering to all rules. He just believed students of creative writing should know the rules of the English language, even the controversial, and little-followed ones. People should at least know these rules, even if they are little used and some people disagree with them. I see why the word “repair” could rankle some, but, again, this was a quiz in a writing class, and he said they could also just avoid these rules, because, again, some people DO agree with these rules and so if you break them you ARE going to distract that reader. And it’s a bit presumptous to say well the rules you follow are arbitrary and only a small fraction of the public adheres to them, therefore you shouldn’t follow them yourself or expose writing students to them. Writers are free to follow whatever rules they like. Wallace didn’t make these rules up, they were passed down to him from someone whose opinion of the English language he highly respected (probably his mom, and English grammarian). Wallace should be free to follow those rules if he wants, and if a college pays him to teach students (by the way, his job interview for his position at Pomona consisted of him saying that people constantly misuse the word nauseous, that was the whole interview – the position was created for him) he is free to teach them the rules he thinks are important to follow, or recognize and avoid. I just think this is a good compromise, but I do see how this is perceived as pedantic. One last thing, there has been alot of glee in bashing this quiz from some of the bloggers, with people saying Wallace was “brutally ignorant”, or an “idiot”, or a “half-wit”. Here is what the woman who posted the quiz said about Wallace and the English language: “[he] was the most obsessively precise user of English I have ever and will ever encounter”. So Wallace isn’t coming from a place of ignorance, and condescension but a place of love – for communication, for literature, and for language.
This is a great discussion, thanks!
December 23, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Jesse S.
By the way I love #6: She just wouldn’t shut up. That’s great!
December 23, 2009 at 4:18 pm
starlingford
If you’re referring to my use of the term ‘half-wit’, it wasn’t directed at Wallace: it was directed at the woman who posted the question and then continued to defend the erroneous answer. And besides, can we not discount the description of Wallace as ‘the most obsessively precise user of English’ if we have caught him being obsessively and precisely incorrect? Further, can we not discount this opinion because it comes from someone who didn’t pick up on Wallace’s original mistakes and therefore perpetuates them, disqualifying her from making an informed judgement?
Any glee that came out of that is simply the natural by-product of discovering that the person non-constructively criticising you from atop their pedestal is not merely incorrect but perhaps even undeserving of the pedestal in the first place.
I agree though – this is a great discussion :-)
December 23, 2009 at 4:20 pm
goofy
Jesse: I disagree that “The crime is when people make these mistakes out of complete ignorance, not that they know the rules but have an arguable reason for breaking them.” Split infinitives are not a mistake and there’s nothing ignorant about them; they are a normal part of English.
A teacher can teach these rules if they want I guess, but they should be upfront about it: these rules aren’t part of standard written English, and following them won’t help to avoid ambiguity or unclarity. The only reason to teach these rules is because some people might judge you harshly if you break them. Students deserve to know the difference between standard English as it is actually used, and the pet peeves of usage commentators.
December 26, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Jesse S.
@starlingford: I guess I don’t see Wallace as putting himself on a pedastal. He’s not going around fixing people’s usage, he’s trying to teach his students what the rules are. Now I understand that alot of people think that they shouldn’t be rules and there is definitely an argument for that in some of these cases, but I think the whole point is that if you want to be a writer and ask that a reader spend his or her time reading your work, you should be cognizant of all types of readers, even the ones who follow rules you disagree with. Now some of the corrections to the sentences in the quiz were clunkers, but in reading Wallace’s prose he never published any clunkers, so maybe discounting Wallace’s usage of the English language based on a quiz is a bit premature and harsh. I’ve read almost all of his work, and he took great care composing his novels, essays, etc. I would encourage you all to withold judgement based on one quiz and read his essay based on this whole prescriptivist/descriptivist war which lays out his rationale for teaching students some of these rules that people disagree with. And to give you an idea of his philosphy regarding people’s usage, he uses St. Augustine’s quote: “Love, and do what you like”. If people want to follow the split-infinitive rule, I don’t see the harm in that; if a teacher wants to teach his students the split-infinitive rule, and encourage them to avoid using it, I don’t see the detriment in that either. Now if someone gets a magic marker out and starts fixing signs in supermarkets, I see the damage in that. And if someone guffaws at someones usage error, I see the harm in that as well. As a writer it’s better to know these “rules” – even if you don’t think you should follow them – than to not even be aware of them, right? As a teacher, how should you expose students to “rules” that are controversial and not always followed? Should they be completely absent?
@goofy: I meant ignorance as a lack of knowledge. If I spent 30 dollars on a novel, and then spent 11 hours of my life to read it. I would be a bit distracted if someone split an infinitive for no reason other than he had never heard of the rule. I would rather they at least know the “rule” and “break” it out of artistic necessity. Now if you as a reader just zoom right past it and think “right on”, that’s fine too. But my point is some readers don’t think that – so as a writer take that person into account as well, even if you disagree with their conculsions. I guess I see it as a matter of respect, if you don’t want to follow the rule, that’s fine, but if I want to follow the rule, that’s fine too. That doesn’t make someone a “half-wit” or mean that they are any less fascinated and enthralled with the English language. It just means they looked at the same information and came to a different conclusion than you. And that’s part of what makes English so beautifully diverse. To close, I think it’s better to know “rules” than to not know them (even if they are arbitrary and rarely followed), and if you guys disagree with that, that is just an example of what makes our intellectual community so strong: diversity of opinion. And lastly: please read Wallace’s essay about this stuff, even if you disagree: if you love language – and I’m sure you do if you are posting on this blog – then it will be, at minimum, an interesting read. You might just find a new favorite writer. Here’s the link:
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html
Happy Holidays, All!
December 28, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Daniel
Jesse S.:
As for criticism of DFW, I can’t speak for anyone else but for my own part I am not criticizing DFW’s writing. I am criticizing this test of his and his teaching ability. And the reason I am criticizing these is that his test leads me to consider these to be deserving of criticism.
You say yourself that “some of the corrections to the sentences in the quiz were clunkers.” Let’s stop and think about this for a minute: In a writing class, he is presenting supposedly correct answers that are, in your own words, “clunkers”. The very fact that he presents these “clunkers” as improvements over the other text, all by itself, ought to be enough to make any neutral observer question the value of the man’s advice.
As for the split infinitives: Yes, there are people who believe there is a rule against it. Yes, as you said in an earlier post, some people do agree with these “rules” and so if you break them you are going to distract that reader. But at the same time, many people disagree with these “rules” and do if you employ clumsy constructions (i.e., “clunkers”) just to follow them then you are going to distract those readers instead. If one is supposed to be “be cognizant of all types of readers”, then surely people in the second group deserve just as much mention a those in the first. If that quiz is any indication, DFW failed in this regard.
So does that mean split infinitives should never be mentioned at all? In a perfect world, where kids weren’t spending years getting junk “rules” like this hammered into their skulls, I would say it means exactly that. But in this world, that sort of thing does happen, and it happens with much more than just the nonexistent prohibition against split infinitives. (Other examples: the claim that you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition, the claim that “none” takes a singular verb instead of a plural one, and the claim that “hopefully” as a disjunct adverb is nonstandard.) The fact of the matter is that these unsupported claims (or as I like to call them, “unrules”) are so widespread that a certain amount of deprogramming is necessary. I think a teacher would be wise to take a day early in the semester and dedicate it to discusing these unrules and why they should be utterly ignored. But the lesson on unrules is the only place a teacher ought to mention a supposed prohibition against split infinitives in a writing class. A teacher should not be telling students that they should consider class action lawsuits against teachers who have failed to tell them about unrules. And no matter how good a writer one may be, one should never, under any circumstances, suggest that a “clunker” like “she didn’t seem ever to stop talking” is an improvement over “she didn’t seem to ever stop talking”.
At the bottom of this, of course, is the issue of whether there is a rule against split infinitives in the first place. I firmly believe there is not, and would point to its widespread use by everyone from some of the greatest authors the language has ever seen (examples: Chaucer, Donne, Wordsworth) to illiterates as evidence. If others want to say there is, they are of course free to do so. But they ought to provide a convincing argument, and simply put, I am yet to see one. And if someone else wants to avoid split infinitives in their writing, they are free to do so. But they would be well-advised to make certain their alternatives are not clunkers.
January 8, 2010 at 9:36 am
Ashe
Why not “she doesn’t ever seem to stop talking”? That’s what I’d consider most natural – followed by your “doesn’t seem to ever stop talking.” I don’t like Wallace’s sentence at all.
January 9, 2010 at 11:37 pm
Victor
Refusing to split infinitives( a sub-heading of verbals) seems illogical to me, seeing as grammaticians/grammarians seem not to frown on ‘splitting verbs'(specifically main verbs containing subordinate clauses from said clauses). Refer to the ‘teddy-bear’ example and re-form the sentence variations from using a present-tense active infinitive to a perfect-tense active main verb (e.g., “… to gradually get rid of..” into “…, got gradually rid of..” to appreciate what I mean to convey.
I (c/w)ould type more (inconsequential) text; however, continuing such via my low-battery non-laptop HTC Droid Eris touch-screen smart_*phone* at an hour whilst already my mind should be rejuvinating(sp?)–well, reason dictates me not_ to ;-). As-is, ‘veallrrady texted a longer-than-at_all-warranted explanation ; ‘Night -,,;
February 5, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Gabe
In the end, I don’t have anything much to add to this discussion, but I wanted to thank you all for having it. It was a joy to read through.
November 9, 2012 at 3:29 am
Indra Sinha
She seemed never to stop talking.
November 9, 2012 at 9:49 am
Nelida K.
I had to laugh out loud at John Cowan’s solution (it would certainly save a lot of paper and ink!). Nice post, and hard-to-refute arguments. The prescriptivist holier-than-thou attitude sometimes looks a bit awry. Language, though we strive to speak and write it as close to the standard as possible, is what it is. It belongs to the speakers, not to the grammarians. Of course there are registers: academic, scientific, familiar, slang, etc., and we should not ignore them; but when language evolves, no amount of frowning can stop the process.
So, good for you, it was a nice read.
July 11, 2013 at 8:03 am
To better understand . . . Or to understand better? | Pros Write
[…] Has anyone given you grief over splitting an infinitive in your writing? If so, they would claim “to better understand” is wrong because the adverb better appears between to and the verb understand. The “rule” to avoid splitting infinitives originated in the 18th century due to a faulty comparison of English with Latin. (For more on such misinformed “rules,” head over to Motivated Grammar.) […]
November 18, 2013 at 3:31 pm
Usualfool
Chuckle, as an English teacher (and therefore someone who has researched his opinion on the matter), there are subtle problems caused by split infinitives–not least of which is ambiguity around the semantic domain of the word “to”–so they remain a bad approach for those who wish to avoid such problems. (For those who are unaware of the problems or how best to fix them, there are grammar rules which are not terribly difficult to follow.)
February 26, 2015 at 5:58 am
Chris Stoate
This one bothers me far less than the crazies winning on the “and I” issue, to the point that I am forced to say and write such idiocies as “between John and myself”. The fact that “and” is now viewed to have grammatical power and must always be followed by a subject invokes my admiration of the powers of mothers correcting their children’s “Billy and me are going to the park” errors so diligently they have changed usage. The failure to teach the parts of speech is to blame.
March 8, 2016 at 1:21 am
In the book Infinite Jest, why is “sic” included in this sentence on p. 11? | Taha Yavuz Bodur weblogging..
[…] [1] Led astray by the no-split-infinitives fetish […]