Wacko myths about writing rules: split infinitive

There's a nether caste of writer, between humble fumbler and blase maven, who obsesses far more about rules than about content. This is a huge section of the writing-ability spectrum.

Don't get me wrong. Rules are important in writing. But only because they serve clarity. People who insist that writing must follow rules only because the rules are rules make me very, very angry. The same goes for people who believe that a writer is lower-class or incompetent for breaking rules. Hence my labelling of the upper end of the skillset as "blase maven".

Listen, all you ("ye"?) blindly fascist knuckle-rapping rulemongers. The only thing you prove by bashing rulebreakers is that you're anal-retentive and misguided enough to think that mastery of a few simple mental concepts makes you an expert and thus "good". It's nauseating to see you patting yourselves on the back for admonishing someone for splitting an infinitive, ending a sentence with a preposition, refusing the validity of the epicene pronoun, beginning a sentence with "because", and so on. It's also saddening to see you passing this nonsense to otherwise bright, creative, energetic minds.

Let's discuss one of these myths: "Never split an infinitive."

What is an infinitive? It's a type of verb. A verb is a word for an action or state of being. "Think", "am", and "throw" are verbs. ("Thought" is a noun, not a verb.) An infinitive is a verb form that functions as a noun or is used with auxiliary verbs, and that names the action or state without specifying the subject (to quote Dictionary.com). So, "To err is human". The verb there is acting as a noun. Thus the subject of the sentence is "To err", and the actual verb is "is". (See, the sentence doesn't say who is erring.) A similar pattern with a noun instead would be "That recipe is French." An example of an infinitive with an auxiliary verb is "I will attend the meeting." There, "attend" is the primary verb, and "will" is the auxiliary one. Again from Dictionary.com, "I want to eat." Just like "I want an apple".

Head spinning yet? If it is, you needn't worry about that stuff. Just know that if anyone chastises you for splitting an infinitive, your correct reply should be what I recommend below.

So, these Mrs. Rancid Thistlebottom grammarians will tell you not to split infinitives. They mean that you can't place any word between "to" an the verb that follows. (And they probably couldn't define "infinitive" beyond "to plus a verb". So, Star Trek was so wrong when they said "To boldly go where no man has gone before."

Now, perhaps you heard that when Barack Obama was sworn in to his latest job, the guy swearing him in screwed up the verbal oath. That was because of this lame "rule". The full article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opinion/22pinker.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

The short version of that story is that the guy telling Obama what to say was so averse to the split infinitive in the oath that he refused to say it aloud as he swore Obama in. He actually changed the wording on the fly! Obama paused, then (likely with a wink) repeated the bungled version he just been fed. Here's what the text is supposed to be: "...solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States."

This is not the "to" kind of infinitive that an average-level rule-psycho obsesses over. It doesn't even occur to a garden-variety knuckle-rapper that "to boldly go" is the same type of "violation" as is "I will always hate broccoli". The second seems fine to these dilettantes.

However, this swearing-in oath does indeed split an infinitive: "will faithfully execute". The swearing-in dude, Chief Justice John Roberts, told Obama to say "...solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” I doubt this is the level of text one can just willy-nilly alter on the fly. In fact, Obama had to be resworn later!

As the article and any competent source will tell you, the rule against splitting infinitives comes from a centuries old, misguided effort to have English conform to Latin. How ridiculous is that? I'm sure the French would love to force their own tongue to follow, say, German language rules! Man, so lame.

Anyway, in Latin, an infinitive is one word. Not two, as it is in English. So of course you cant split it. (People do even split single words in particularly emphatic English: "Why?! Be freakin' cause!")

So, your correct reply to just such a tiresome prude who clearly has no love of music or anything beautiful should be something similar to this: "The rule against splitting infinitives comes from an effort to make English follow the rules of Latin. In Latin, infinitives are one word. In English, they are more than one. Also, Latin is not the official language of any state on Earth, so Latin hardly seems to be a language worth pursuing. Finally, English needs to follow the rules of Latin as much as Portuguese needs to follow the rules of Mandarin. Splitting infinitives is and *has always been* [wink here] a legitimate structure in English."

I had nobly intended when I began writing this to examine several urban myths of English writing. However, it grows late and my infected gallbladder is cruelly sending pain signals to my back and chest. Thus, I will glibly end this here, and I will even knavishly neglect to proofread.

Whee, splitting infinitives!

P.S.: I later ran this post through MS Word's spell checker.