Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

Thank you.  That page (dated 1999) has by far the latest prohibition of
split infinitives that I know about.  (Speaking of which, it also says
ending a sentence with a preposition is "considered weak".)

Indeed it's a rich source of English-usage material.  The two biggest
surprises for me were that the author says "The government are" is
"strictly speaking... grammatically incorrect" and uses "England" where
I'd have expected "Britain".  ("In England some words ending with a
hard 'g' sound have a silent 'ue' appended to them, such as 'catalogue'
or 'epilogue'."  I don't like that "or", by the way.)  Devotees of
Skitt's Law, I can save you some work: search for "effect".

Well, if I must, I must --

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The American Heritage® Book of English Usage.
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English.  1996.

1. Grammar: Traditional Rules, Word Order, Agreement, and Case

§ 59. split infinitive

To boldly go where no one has gone before. This phrase, so familiar to Star
Trek fans, presents us with the dilemma of the split infinitive-an
infinitive that has an adverb between the to and the verb. Split infinitives
have been condemned as ungrammatical for nearly 200 years, but it is hard to
see what exactly is wrong with saying to boldly go. Its meaning is clear. It
has a strong rhythm than reinforces the meaning. And rearranging the phrase
only makes it less effective. We may also want to go boldly where no one has
gone before, but it doesn't sound as exciting. And certainly no one wants to
go where no one has gone before boldly. That is a different voyage entirely.

 In fact, the split infinitive is distinguished both by its length of use
and the greatness of its users. People have been splitting infinitives since
the 14th century, and some of the most noteworthy splitters include John
Donne, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson,
William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, and Willa
Cather.

 The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false
analogy with Latin. The thinking is that because the Latin infinitive is a
single word, the English infinitive should be treated as if it were a single
unit. But English is not Latin, and people split infinitives all the time
without giving it a thought. Should we condemn compound infinitives, such as
I want to go and have a look, simply because the infinitive have has no to
next to it?

 Still, if you dislike infinitives split by adverbs, you can often avoid
them without difficulty. You can easily recast the sentence To better
understand the miners' plight, he went to live in their district as To
understand the miners' plight better, he went to live in their district. But
as we saw with the Star Trek example, you must be careful not to ruin the
rhythm of the sentence or create an unintended meaning by displacing an
adverb.

 If you plan on keeping your split infinitives, you should be wary of
constructions that have more than one word between to and the verb. The
Usage Panel splits down the middle on the one-adverb split infinitive. Fifty
percent accept it in the sentence The move allowed the company to legally
pay the employees severance payments that in some cases exceeded $30,000.
But only 23 percent of the panel accepts the split infinitive in this
sentence: We are seeking a plan to gradually, systematically, and
economically relieve the burden. The panel is more tolerant of constructions
in which the intervening words are intrinsic to the sense of the verb.
Eighty-seven percent of the panel accepts the sentence We expect our output
to more than double in a year.

 Remember too that infinitive phrases in which the adverb precedes a
participle, such as to be rapidly rising, to be clearly understood, and to
have been ruefully mistaken, are not split and should be acceptable to
everybody. And don't be deceived by to-constructions with a gerund, as in He
is committed to laboriously assembling all of the facts of the case. Here
what is split is not an infinitive but a prepositional phrase.

The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton
Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Get a life.

The "prohibition" against split infitives is a strawman debate started by
latin influenced anal-retentive fools such as yourself.

To willfully and arbitrarily split an infinitive is something one should
take great pains to not do.  As for ending a sentence a preposition
with, Yoda, I'll leave that for someone else to deal with.

--Jeff