This Just In - It's OK to Boldly Split Infinitives.

[MineralMan]

It's actually always been OK. Some weird grammarians have tried to make that a rule since the 1800s. They've never succeeded, and that rule only worked to seriously confuse readers and obfuscate meaning.

Who says? The Oxford English Dictionary for one:

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/grammar/split-infinitives

I say so, too, and I am the official DU Grammar Nazi, I'm told.

[JimGinPA]

1. As Long As You Don't Dangle A Participle

[Kirk Lover]

2. In all fairness at a certain age that is hard to avoid.

[MineralMan]

7. Or end a sentence with a preposition.

That rule is also wrong, of course. As Winston Churchill once sort of said, "That is the sort of rule up with which I will not put."

There's nothing wrong with a preposition at the end of a sentence if the meaning is clear. There is something wrong with slavishly following rules, however.

[ThoughtCriminal]

33. Bastard!

[Arkansas Granny]

3. Oh, thank heavens. I really have worried about that.

[Kaleva]

4. What's an infinitive? Sounds like elitest talk.

If I were to split infinitives, it's purely by accident as I don't know what an infinitive is or how to spilt one.

[dalton99a]

6. Most people have no idea, either.

[TlalocW]

18. It's the "to form" of a verb

So before, it was wrong for Captain Kirk to say, "To boldly go," because boldly is splitting to go. He should have said, "To go boldly," but now everything is hunky-dory.

TlalocW

[unblock]

5. infinitives must hang together, or they are sure to separately hang.

just curious as to the political aspect of split infinitives....?

[MineralMan]

9. All human endeavors have a political aspect.

Consider Donald Trump's English usage.

[Beakybird]

8. Ugh

I remember getting a D on an important college English lit essay with several split infinitives crossed out in red.

It was on Kipling, and I had never kipled before.

[MineralMan]

10. Well, using split infinitives in an essay for an English class

is a special case. Academic writing is, well, academic. It's useless in any other venue, as I learned when I began doing magazine writing after getting a Masters degree in English.

One must learn the accepted usages of whatever field one pursues, I guess.

[wasupaloopa]

11. To knowingly tell others how to write is one

of the things I find to be elitist.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

12. I believe that rule about infinitives came about

because ancient grammarians thought that English grammar should be like Latin grammar. Their infinitives are a single word, so they can't be split. English uses a two word infinitive. Sometimes splitting it makes the meaning more clear. Most of the time it's better not to split the infinitive.

Not sure where the dumb rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes that's the only way to make sense.

[MineralMan]

13. Yes, I think that's true.

Back in the days when Latin was commonly taught in schools, I suppose that made some sense. However, there are very tenuous ties between English and Latin grammar. So, it never made sense to me.

I learned more about Latin when learning Russian, which is a very complex language, grammatically, just like Latin. Oddly enough, though, learning Russian taught me a great deal about English grammar, so go figure.

I can write in formal academic English, if necessary. It's almost never necessary, though.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. You're old enough that you might have been taught

English grammar in school.

In recent decades the teaching of it has almost disappeared, and the foreign language teachers complain, and rightly so, that they have to teach both English grammar and the grammar of the language they are teaching.

Someone I know once commented that English doesn't have any grammar. When I questioned him a bit more closely, what he meant was that English doesn't have verb forms the way a lot of other languages do.

[MineralMan]

16. Oh, yes. We got plenty of grammar instruction.

English has a very irregular grammar. That's one of the reasons it's so hard for non-native speakers to learn.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

24. Actually, we have a very stripped down grammar.

We don't have the vast number of tenses that some languages have, we don't have declensions of nouns. We don't do the gender thing.
Our adjectives don't change form very much. We depend on word order for our sentences to make sense.

What's hard is learning another language fluently, but a lot depends on how young you get a start on it.

I know a man who moved to this country from Peru when he was 18 years old. Aside from a very slight accent, his command of English is flawless. He has a sister who lives in France, and if he visits her for a couple of weeks he comes back speaking fluent French. Now that's a person with an incredible gift for languages.

[MineralMan]

25. Russian is a highly inflected language, with

complete conjugation of verbs, complex tenses, cases, moods a complete range prefixes and suffixes for verbs that change their meaning and noun and adjective endings galore. And everything has to agree in gender and number for each changeable thing. It's mostly very regular, though, so once you learn all that stuff, you're done. It's daunting, though, until you understand the structure of the grammar and the rules. English has a thin subset of that stuff, but it has many of its own oddities, and is very irregular. And then there's spelling, which has not so much to do with how words sound when pronounced.

I can read anything written in Russian aloud without error, even if I don't understand the words I'm reading, pronouncing everything correctly. It is that regular in spelling and pronunciation.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

35. Mostly very regular.

Hmmm. But I'm guessing that it takes a lot longer to learn all those tenses, cases, moods, etc.

English spelling is the result of several things, not the least of which is pronunciation changes unaccompanied by spelling changes, and having taken in lots of words from other languages, sometimes preserving the original spelling, sometimes not. But as bad as it is, at least 90% of the words are spelled according to some rule or another, which can't be any harder to learn than the complexities of Russian.

English is very forgiving of the kinds of mistakes newcomers to the language make. I wonder if Russian is the same way, or is the need for all that agreement such that if you get it wrong you make no sense.

French has a reputation for having lots of irregular verbs but Spanish, which is considered easier, has more irregular verbs which are even more irregular than the French ones. Italian thinks it has irregular verbs but their idea of irregular is a teensy tiny variation.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

15. Sorry. While I understand that it's not really a rule

and it's OK to split infinitives, I've been writing for some 45 years and I can't bring myself ever to do it. It just sounds wrong.

[MineralMan]

17. Well, it's OK not to split infinitives, too.

Both things are OK. Personal writing styles vary a good deal. Your sentence could be written either way. There would be no confusion of meaning. That's the real issue. "To boldly go where no man has gone before" would sound really silly, if written either as "Boldly to go" or "To go boldly." Nobody would remember it. We remember the phrase, in part, due to the use of a split infinitive. The adverb better modifies the verb in "To boldly go..."

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

19. And maybe remove ambiguity. Other languages that have a separate infinitive

allow splitting. For example, in Norwegian the infinitive å (to) accompanies the infinitive form of a verb (e.g., gjøre, "do" or "make" ), and there's no rule that says the words can't be split. So you could say: Jeg prøver å ikke gjøre hundrevis av grammatiske feil (I try not to make hundreds of grammatical mistakes), where the infinitive å gjøre is split, or you could say: Jeg prøver ikke å gjøre hundrevis av grammatiske feil (I do not try to make hundreds of grammatical mistakes), where it isn't split. The meanings of the two sentences are slightly different - the first says I am making an effort to avoid mistakes; the second suggests I'm not actually trying to make them. The same shades of meaning might also be found in the English sentences. Still, I feel all squicky when I split infinitives in English.

[MineralMan]

20. The copy editor at one of the magazines I wrote for scolded

me for my academic usages. She told me to lighten up and use more conversational diction. So, I stopped being a slave to formal and arbitrary, false academic grammar rules. Over the years, she and I became good friends, and often had lengthy conversations about writing styles and being flexible to improve readability and clarity. We talked a great deal about comma usage. It was because of her that I learned to use them more effectively where there was an option to use or not use a comma. The Boston comma, for example, was optional in that magazine's style sheet, and was only used in series constructions when it was needed for clarity of meaning. Other publications have other rules.

Modern English grammar is more flexible than it once was, and that's for the better, I think. Slavish following of some grammar rules can lead to stilted constructions that actually reduce readability and clarity. The non-rule about split infinitives is one of those. I try to use whichever option enhances what I am saying.

English is an odd, odd language.

[Glorfindel]

31. I'm sorry, but just imagine the Prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V:

Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
To gently hear, to kindly judge, our play.

instead of:

Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Fingernails on a chalk-board ain't in it!

[MineralMan]

32. He wrote it as he wrote it.

Had he written it in the first form, you'd think that sounded right, I assure you.

Also, consider the time the play was written and the audience for which it was written.

[NCTraveler]

21. I'm going to split your fucking infinitive!!!

I'm going to really split your damn infinitive!!!!

[Buns_of_Fire]

22. If not for Yoda, having such a conversation, we wouldn't be. nt

[Danascot]

23. Thank god!

I've been splitting infinitives knowingly for years and looking worriedly over my shoulder thinking the grammar police were on my tail.

[Glorfindel]

26. Not to me, it isn't. Split infinitives just sound WRONG.

She told me to not come over..
...to boldly go where no man has gone before.
...to never say, "never."

But I guess my age is showing. I also will fight and die to defend the Oxford comma!

[gvstn]

27. There really aren't any rules in writing any more.

Christ, I can barely put pencil to paper anymore let alone be grammatically correct. And I don't think I'm alone in that. And the infinitive thing always seemed dumb to me, if people understand what I am saying, then what is the problem?

[MineralMan]

28. In the end, grammar, spelling and punctuation rules

all exist to help ensure that people understand what you are saying.

"Let's eat, Grandma" or "Let's eat Grandma." Both are correct, grammatically. They mean vastly different things.

[gvstn]

30. I understand.

It just seems people today speak anyway they like and everything is accepted. Some rules are good but not a lot of people today follow them.

[womanofthehills]

34. I love the book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves"

with a panda on the front eating shoots and then leaving. It also contains punch out punctuation if one feels like correcting punctuation when out and about.

[cabot]

29. Fine. But they'll have to pry the Oxford Comma out of my cold, dead, and blue hands.

That is all.

[ProudLib72]

36. So your going to ostentatiously tell I me grammer is bad?

Well I ain't gonna hang around this street corner no more! Next you'll be telling me not to use tautologies. I won't put up with that. No sir, I just won't stand for it!