Comments on: What is a Split Infinitive?

By: Passerby

Passerby — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 17:33:34 +0000

While you don’t agree with Paul and Steve, the fact remains that they are right. You’ve asserted that there is no other other way to express “I want to simply live”, without splitting the infinitive. That is inaccurate. I’m a long time out of college, certainly no dedicated grammarian, and still I noticed the factual error. The spirit of the post–that rules that don’t affect meaning are pointless rules–is sensible. Supporting the premise with faulty examples, and thus undermining your credibility, isn’t.

By: stevemarvin

stevemarvin — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:03:17 +0000

I want, simply, to live.

By: Tom S. Fox

Tom S. Fox — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:17:15 +0000

“What’s to stop me deciding German is superior to English and therefore deciding all my verbs to the end of the sentence to send?”

Well, for one the fact that German doesn’t do that.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:50:19 +0000

Good; the two fake grammar rules that annoy me most are this split infinitive nonsense and the one about ending a sentence with a preposition.

Come to think of it though, if we want to change the rules, why not drop the “to”? Other languages don’t need it, so why English?

“Boldly go when no man has gone before.”
Because that changes the meaning to an imperative

By: Nathan G Zhang

Nathan G Zhang — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:39:24 +0000

I thought that Roy Peter Clark, in his book Writing Tools, declared adverbs as being dangerous. Boldly is an adverb and it does not really modify go in another direction, it just makes it sound braver.

In the book he gives an example: sweetly faked attention. Faked goes in one direction, sweetly modifies it in another.

So in my view boldly go goes in the same direction as go, so boldly is unnecessary. Of course, being a Trekkie, I have no intention of changing Trekkie history or culture by annihilating boldly…