Culture | Johnson

The ban on split infinitives is an idea whose time never came

To boldly go where grammarians have feared to tread

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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on “correcting” split infinitives. “Set him adrift and try an intelligent Newfoundland dog in his place,” Shaw fulminated, “without interfering with his perfect freedom of choice between ‘to suddenly go’, ‘to go suddenly’ and ‘suddenly to go’.”

This spring a new edition of The Economist’s style guide is published*. Many of its changes are of a kind only a copy-editor would notice; but on an issue that has set teeth grinding for centuries, it marks a sea-change that Shaw would have appreciated. It says infinitives may be split.

Those who believe the split infinitive is a grammatical crime will see yet more evidence that standards are in a death spiral. Those who have never seen anything wrong with it will be chagrined that we ever forbade it. The second lot have the better argument. The new guide says that sometimes splitting the infinitive is the best, or even only, option.

John Comly is the first known writer to issue a ban on the split, saying in 1803 that: “An adverb should not be placed between a verb of the infinitive mood and the preposition ‘to’ which governs it.” At the time this practice was not common, even though such splits had arisen in English almost as soon as “to” started appearing with infinitives. They crop up, for example, in “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight” in the 14th century.

The split had declined in the early-modern period. Shakespeare split just one infinitive, the King James Bible none. Samuel Johnson wrote “Milton was too busy to much miss his wife”, but the usage really took off again in the 19th century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling all split infinitives. Data from Google Books confirm a 19th-century surge in “to” followed by an adverb.

But Comly’s “rule” was out there, even as great writers ignored it. It made its way into other popular grammars of the 19th century until it became something every educated person thought they knew. Only in the early 20th century did the best grammarians begin fighting back. H.W. Fowler called it both a “fetish” and a “superstition” in his magisterial usage dictionary of 1926.

The persistence of the “rule” is the true curiosity. One explanation is that, like the dangling participle, the split infinitive has a catchy name, making the rule easy to pass on. Another is that it is easy to spot; noticing something between “to” and a verb is a gratifyingly simple task. A third is the shadow of classical languages. Infinitives are single words in Latin and Greek, so early-modern authors who were influenced by them may have unconsciously avoided splitting the two-word English counterpart. But “to” is not really part of the infinitive, much less an inseparable one. In I can come, “come” is an infinitive with no “to”. The split is thus not even a real phenomenon, much less one to shun.

Some writers, having abided by the rule for so long, will never manage to discard it. Fine. But the lazy remedy, merely to move a modifier one word left or right, is worse. Constantly to do this results in an odd, jarring rhythm. (Robert Burns wrote “to nobly stem tyrannic pride” because it has a pleasingly punchy beat to it.) And the “move it left or right” manoeuvre often means that the modifier ends up modifying the wrong thing, or creating an ambiguity. “She decided to gradually retire” is clear. But moving “gradually” left changes the meaning, while moving it right creates confusion: a gradual decision or a gradual retirement?

There are better ways to reword splits, and our style book recommends that since they annoy so many readers, where they can be avoided altogether, writers should do so. Sound advice, but it comes with two caveats. One is that we get almost as many letters about sentences tortured to avoid the split as we do about split infinitives themselves. The other is that writers should not make a habit of dodging the truth merely because it is unpopular among a dedicated minority of readers. There is nothing wrong with a split infinitive. It is time to utterly and decisively reject a rule that should never have been on the books in the first place.

*The Economist Style Guide. Public Affairs; 288 pages; $11.99. Profile Books; £9.99

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Doing the splits"

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