For those who boldly violate the Prime Directive by trying to enrich the general public’s understanding of English grammar and thus change the planetary culture, each tiny triumph is something to treasure. And we had one about a month ago. The Economist announced (April 28, 2018) that the new edition of its style guide would no longer proscribe the “split infinitive.”
I like to think discussion on Lingua Franca helped to stiffen the magazine’s resolve on this issue (see this 2016 post, following up this one two years earlier, and this one two years before that).
Naturally, letters to the editor flocked in. The May 26 issue printed four of them (subheadlined, inevitably, “To boldly go”).
Jack Winkler wrote enthusiastically from London: “Please relentlessly continue to radically cull prescriptive language rules. There are many more that need discarding.” (To radically cull is his little joke, of course, illustrating the very easily recognized construction that is under discussion. People cannot resist doing this.)
Oscar Despard, in Dublin, had only one regret: “Your change in grammar rules will surely lead to the sad demise of that finest subgenre of correspondence to The Economist: the letter designed grammatically to mock your avoidance of the split infinitive.” (Grammatically to mock is his little joke, of course, illustrating avoidance of the very easily recognized construction that is under discussion. People cannot resist doing this.)
H. Coleman Switzkay, of Bala Cynwyd, Penn., by contrast, felt dejected:
Et tu, Brute? I pen this missive heavy of heart and slumped in despair. Now that your venerable publication, the last bastion of grammatical fortitude, has abandoned its principled stand against splitting the infinitive, are any of the sacred rules of grammar safe? What next? Will we all soon be pondering the question of to be or to not be?
(To not be is his little joke, of course, illustrating the very easily recognized construction that is under discussion. People cannot resist doing this. ... Is it just me, or are you having a déjà vu experience?)
Switzkay flaunts his conservatism in vocabulary: missive, venerable, bastion, fortitude — he writes to us from the 19th century.
But his knowledge of the past is faulty: The Economist never had a “principled stand” against placing adverbs between to and a following verb. The style guide’s stance appealed merely to cowardice: “The ban is pointless. Unfortunately, to see it broken is so annoying to so many people that you should observe it.” No edict was ever less principled.
Switzkay also holds (or affects to hold) the weird belief that allowing an adverb to intervene in a to + Verb sequence will eventually yield to requiring it, forcing the rewording of Hamlet’s soliloquy. (I remember meeting a homophobic worker in the printing industry in Queens back in 1980, when People v. Onofre had just made homosexual acts legal in the state of New York; he told me forcefully that he was planning to “get out of New York State before they make it obligatory.”) Grammarians are not in the business of Shakespeare expurgation, or banning natural-sounding and frequent constructions like not to be outdone.
One further letter-writer, J.M. Hallinan of Sydney, Australia, is also a conservative. He refers back to a quote from G.B. Shaw that appeared in the Johnson column on language in The Economist on April 28 (Shaw, on finding his split infinitives “corrected” by a subeditor, told the editor: “I ask you, sir, to put this man out. Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place, without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between ‘to suddenly go,’ ‘to go suddenly’ and ‘suddenly to go’”). Says Hallinan:
The Economist should not take any notice of that Fabian windbag, George Bernard Shaw. Perhaps your style has been changed to appeal to your large North American readership, unsplit infinitives being extinct in those parts.
Unsplit infinitives extinct? In American newspaper text, to followed directly by a verb is vastly more frequent than to followed by any adverb.
And even if we interpret “unsplit infinitives” as “infinitivals modified by an adverb that is not positioned after the to,” Hallinan’s extinction claim is still wildly false: Infinitival complements in current American writing are not limited to positioning adverbs between to and the verb (able to immediately repay); adverbs are often positioned before the to (able immediately to repay) or following the verb (able to repay immediately).
Like so many conservatives talking about English grammar, Hallinan simply populates the interstellar void of grammar knowledge by inventing facts. People just make stuff up about language — and expect to get away with it.
