the Obama administration was wrong to initially defend the bonusesI hiccupped over this split infinitive and began a post titled "Mitt Romney, you are dead to me", but on reflection it's ok; "was wrong initially to defend" is unclear and "was wrong to defend the bonuses intitially" sounds weaker. Therefore Romney remains my preferred conservative for 2012. Phew!
I don't care about grammar. English doesn't care about grammar. Grammar is a means to an end. The end is clarity with euphony. If infinitive splitting serves that end, well fine, but it rarely does. "To boldly go" well emulates the plonking bathos of Star Trek and works in context, but "boldly to go" is better both for euphony and emphasis. English is not a prescriptive language and Shakespeare is the least prescriptive of writers, yet he split an infinitive but once and that was a special case.
I do not prohibit split infinitives; I prohibit dull language. We use language to think; dull language, dull thought. Keep your tools sharp. I am not that purist of whom the revered Raymond Chandler wrote:
By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split..
Comments (1)
Nice post, and it reflects something I've learned while blogging--people don't talk in accepted literary and grammatical forms. When I started UNCoRRELATED, I wrote in an academic style as I was trained to do, until a neighbor with a masters degree in accounting told me that he didn't understand the vocabulary I was using. If I was losing college-educated readers, then I was going to have a problem. There is a web service that allows you to provide an URL which it then parses and reports the grade level at which the page is written at. Notably, the most successful blogs were written at an 6th grade level, and no more than 8th grade.
I guess one could consider that depressing, since it means drawing with crayons rather than using the full range of possible colors, but it forced me to consider structure to a degree I never did before.
Ultimately, as you point out, the goal is to get the point across, not to follow antiquated rules...
Posted by Mick Stockinger | March 18, 2009 9:31 AM
Posted on March 18, 2009 09:31