File under “To Gleefully Mock a Killing Bird”: Making fun of the “Never split an infinitive” rule in three separate entries is not above me.
There’s a reason that an obsolete meaning of infinitive is “an infinite amount,” as the whole of our discussion of the split infinitive is now about to border on the infinitive.
Let’s get down and dirty on the subject of split infinitives. The argument is that in Latin, infinitives were expressed in single words. And splitting a single word would be akin to splitting an absolute. Tut-tut, no splitting of absolutes. Well, watch me: Abso- frikken-lute. You can split ahso-frikken-lute (frikken being an infix, in the spirit of suffix and prefix), so why can’t you split two separate English words? You can toss words around in a sentence like a salad (“I am Sam, Sam I am, I do not like green eggs and ham”), so why do to and go in the infinitive to go have to cling together in perfect order like atoms in a molecule? Splitting infinitives is not nuclear fission, though doing so seems to set off thermonuclear devices in the rhetoric of some persnickitors.
When you declare that I’m worrying about this too much, I agree absolutely and abso-frikken-lutely, because we all are worrying about it too much. I speak in the entry above about how adherence to the rule can upset the rhythm of a sentence; perhaps more important is that it can upset the rhythm of the writer: “Oh, did I split that infinitive? And by the way, what the hell is an infinitive in the first place?”
Bill Brohaugh
144
So, if you’re worrying more about keeping infinitives together as if you’re a verbal marriage counselor and not a writer, a communicator, a normal speaker of English, you endanger comfortable rhythms of the communication itself. Yes, particularly in formal communication, we must understand and adhere to an array of rules and conventions with each keystroke, with each verbalization. But there’s paying attention, and then there’s being neurotic. Here I defer to the respected Mr. Francis George Fowler, coauthor of Fowler’s 49 Modem English Usage:
The English speaking world may be divided into (i) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; and (5) those who know & distinguish. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, & are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes.
And to definitively add quotational exclamation points, let me also bring in Mr. Raymond Chandler: “If I want to split an infinitive I’ll damn well split an infinitive.” And Mr. Norman Mailer: “If I split an infinitive, I mean to goddamn well split it.” and Mr. Oxford English Dictionary, which cites this 1897 quote: “Are our critics aware that Byron is the father of their split infinitive? ‘To slowly trace,’ says the noble poet, ‘the forest’s shady scene.’”