DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language advocacy, and then, in the third sentence, you split an infinitive on me (“to carefully proofread my books”)! This notwithstanding, you continue to have my devoted readership. Thanks, and best wishes for the new year. –David Chadwick-Brown, Bankers Hill
A split infinitive (“to better understand,” “to always disagree”) occurs when an adverb or adverbial construction is placed between to and a verb. In a famous New Yorker cartoon, we see Captain Bligh sailing away from the Bounty in a rowboat and shouting, “So, Mr. Christian! You propose to unceremoniously cast me adrift?” The caption beneath the drawing reads: “The crew can no longer tolerate Captain Bligh’s ruthless splitting of infinitives.”
When infinitives are cleft, some schoolmarms, regardless of gender or actual profession, become exercised. Here we confront the triumph of mandarin decree over reality, of mummified code over usage that actually inhales and exhales — another passionate effort by the absolutists to protect the language from the very people who speak it.
No reputable authority on usage, either in England or in the United States, bans the split infinitive. Major writers — Phillip Sidney, John Donne, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Coleridge, Emily Brontë, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry James, and Willa Cather (to name a dozen out of thousands) — have been blithely splitting infinitives ever since the early 14th century. Thus, when I counsel my readers to relax about splitting infinitives, I am not, to slightly paraphrase Star Trek, telling them to boldly go where no one has gone before. Studies show that a majority of current newspaper and magazine editors accept a sentence using the words “to instantly trace” and that the infinitive is cleft in 19.8 percent of all instances where an adverb appears.
The prohibition of that practice was created in 1762 out of whole cloth by one Robert Lowth, an Anglican bishop and self-appointed grammarian. Lowth’s anti-infinitive-splitting injunction is founded on models in the classical tongues. But there is no precedent in these languages for condemning the split infinitive because in Greek and Latin (and all the other romance languages) the infinitive (videre, hablar, etc.) is a single word that is impossible to sever.
George Bernard Shaw and James Thurber were stylistically hassled by certain know-it-alls. Shaw struck back in a letter to the Times of London: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of time to chasing split infinitives. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or to quickly go or quickly to go. The important thing is that he should go at once.” With typical precision, concision, and incision, Thurber wrote to a meddlesome editor, “When I split an infinitive, it is going to damn well stay split!”
In his seminal Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Henry W. Fowle describes anti-infinitive splitters as people who “betray by their practice that their aversion to the split infinitive springs not from instinctive good taste, but from the tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinions of others.”
Why is the alleged syntactical sin of splitting infinitives committed with such frequency? Primarily because in modern English adjectives and adverbs are usually placed directly before the words they modify, as in “She successfully completed the course.”
I do not advocate that you go about splitting infinitives promiscuously and artlessly. How would you gracefully rewrite these split-infinitive sentences?: “By a 5-4 majority, the court voted to permit states to severely restrict women’s rights to choose.” “The Red Sox shut out the Yankees 6-0 yesterday to all but clinch the American League East division title.” And this last one, which shows up on my computer screen whenever I jettison a file: “Are you sure that you want to permanently delete the selected file from your Address Book?” In my view and to my ear, you wouldn’t want to revise these constructions; they are already clear and readable.
It is indeed acceptable practice to sometimes split an infinitive. If infinitive splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!