To split or to not split (an infinitive)
George Bernard Shaw to the Times of London:
There is a pedant on your staff who spends far too much of his time searching for split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman uses a split infinitive if he thinks the sense demands it. I call for this man’s instant dismissal; it matters not whether he decides to quickly go or to go quickly or quickly to go. Go he must, and at once.
Cited in Patricia T. O’Connor’s Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know about Writing.
HT: Trevin Wax via Justin Taylor
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Categories: Uncategorized
Hey, if a split infinitive is good enough for Star Trek, then who are we to argue?
I say that we are to bodly go where no grammarian has gone before.
…why? Because I don’t think that “boldly to go” or “to go boldly” would work with William Shatner’s peculiar cadence.
A split infinitive is not something which anyone should with up to have to put.
Heh. “Scholars” put too much emphasis on split infinitives. The only reason it’s even an issue is because way back when the English thought the French were the bees knees, they realized that French infinitives are one word, and as such are never split apart the way our totally unfashionable two-word English infinitives are. So they were all, “ZOMG you can’t split an infinitive! It’s uncivilized!” And they got other smarty-pants people to agree with them, and before you know it, a nonsensical prescriptive grammar rule was born. Funny how often things like that happen.