{"id":229,"date":"2017-09-19T20:51:08","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T20:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=229"},"modified":"2021-02-24T22:05:24","modified_gmt":"2021-02-24T22:05:24","slug":"why-i-declared-war-on-the-split-infinitive-rule-and-so-should-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2017\/09\/19\/why-i-declared-war-on-the-split-infinitive-rule-and-so-should-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I declared war on the split infinitive rule (and so should you)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chad Chisholm, CIFC Director<\/h2>\n
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When I was going through the public school system, I got my fingers figuratively bruised a few times by some old school English grammarians: there was a time when I was more afraid of them than I was of the dark forces of galactic imperialism beyond the Neutral Zone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Not that I didn’t\u00a0sometimes deserve a scolding. For instance, after one of my middle school teachers tirelessly preached a sermon on the necessity of never ‘splitting infinitives,’ I continued to delight in such heretical constructions as “John decided\u00a0to ravenously eat his egg salad sandwich,” and so forth. (Later when I committed the ultimate blasphemy of writing ‘I’ in my own opinion paper, that sprung a full-scale Inquisition. I made it out alive…barely. )<\/p>\n

But back to infinitives.<\/p>\n

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Even in middle school, I couldn’t understand why ‘Our Grammar who art in Heaven’ had declared that I couldn’t insert an adverb in there when the English language provided an infinitive form that was derived from two distinct words. This provided an unendurable temptation (the apple in the Garden of Grammar Neatness) to write in that heretical adverb and adulterate a so-called perfect construction.<\/p>\n

Later, I learned that the ‘split infinitive’ rule was constructed by Latinists in the 19th century who used the rules of the dead language in order to standardize English, and thus keep it both ‘stable’ and resistant to regional, dialectical, and cultural adaptations.<\/p>\n

This is where the rule of the split infinitive originates.\u00a0However, the rule enforces an artificial and (at times) unnecessary restriction on speakers of English.<\/p>\n

Latin is a Romance language, and English\u2014though its vocabulary borrows heavily from Old French and Latin\u2014is Germanic, and functions as an Analytic (word order) language. The rule makes sense with Spanish infinitives\u2014take ‘beber,’ which means “to drink”\u2014because it is one word in the language. Therefore, adding an adjective into the word (as some languages do) can make a mess.\u00a0But since English uses two words to express ‘to drink,’ then it makes no mess to say “I want\u00a0to voraciously drink\u00a0this bottle of Gatorade.”<\/p>\n

Sometimes splitting an infinitive might sound awkward in sentences, though not as awkward, I’ll wager, as never ending a sentence with a preposition can sometimes prove. (Remember Sir Winston Churchill’s famous plea, that “ending a sentence with a preposition is something\u00a0up with which I will not put.”)<\/p>\n

However, sometimes the ‘split’ can sound quite wonderful, such as the famous line in Star Trek, “to boldly go\u00a0where no man has gone before.”\u00a0But whether it sounds awkward or not, it’s neither heresy nor a taboo to break this ‘rule.’<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chad Chisholm, CIFC Director When I was going through the public school system, I got my fingers figuratively bruised a few times by some old school English grammarians: there was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":92,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[341],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-language-studies","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":752,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/752"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}