Split infinitive

In the English language, a split infinitive or cleft infinitive is a grammatical construction in which a word or phrase comes between the to and the bare infinitive of the to form of the infinitive verb. Usually, an adverb or an adverbial phrase comes between them. Examples of split infinitives include:A well-known example in the opening sequence of the Star Trek television series, in which William Shatner says 'to boldly go where no man has gone before'; the adverb boldly is said to split the infinitive to go. Occasions where more than one word splits the infinitive, such as: 'The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years'.No other grammatical issue has so divided English speakers since the split infinitive was declared to be a solecism in the 19c : raise the subject of English usage in any conversation today and it is sure to be mentioned.An adverb should not be placed between the verb of the infinitive mood and the preposition to, which governs it; as Patiently to wait—not To patiently wait.The practice of separating the prefix of the infinitive mode from the verb, by the intervention of an adverb, is not unfrequent among uneducated persons … I am not conscious, that any rule has been heretofore given in relation to this point … The practice, however, of not separating the particle from its verb, is so general and uniform among good authors, and the exceptions are so rare, that the rule which I am about to propose will, I believe, prove to be as accurate as most rules, and may be found beneficial to inexperienced writers. It is this :—The particle, TO, which comes before the verb in the infinitive mode, must not be separated from it by the intervention of an adverb or any other word or phrase; but the adverb should immediately precede the particle, or immediately follow the verb.A correspondent states as his own usage, and defends, the insertion of an adverb between the sign of the infinitive mood and the verb. He gives as an instance, 'to scientifically illustrate'. But surely this is a practice entirely unknown to English speakers and writers. It seems to me, that we ever regard the to of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb. And, when we have already a choice between two forms of expression, 'scientifically to illustrate' and 'to illustrate scientifically', there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common usage.The 'split' infinitive has taken such hold upon the consciences of journalists that, instead of warning the novice against splitting his infinitives, we must warn him against the curious superstition that the splitting or not splitting makes the difference between a good and a bad writer.One reason why the older generation feel so strongly about English grammar is that we were severely punished if we didn't obey the rules! One split infinitive, one whack; two split infinitives, two whacks; and so on.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, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.The rule forbidding a split infinitive comes from the time when Latin was the universal language of the world. All scholarly, respectable writing was done in Latin. Scientists and scholars even took Latin names to show that they were learned. In Latin, infinitives appear as a single word. The rule which prohibits splitting an infinite shows deference to Latin and to the time when the rules which governed Latin grammar were applied to other languages.Raymond Chandler, 1947.It is of no avail merely to fling oneself desperately out of temptation; one must so do it that no traces of the struggle remain; that is, sentences must be thoroughly remodeled instead of having a word lifted from its original place & dumped elsewhere … In the English language, a split infinitive or cleft infinitive is a grammatical construction in which a word or phrase comes between the to and the bare infinitive of the to form of the infinitive verb. Usually, an adverb or an adverbial phrase comes between them. Examples of split infinitives include:A well-known example in the opening sequence of the Star Trek television series, in which William Shatner says 'to boldly go where no man has gone before'; the adverb boldly is said to split the infinitive to go. Occasions where more than one word splits the infinitive, such as: 'The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years'. In the 19th century, some linguistic prescriptivists sought to introduce a prescriptive rule against the split infinitive. The construction is to some extent still the subject of disagreement, but modern English usage guides have dropped the objection to it. In Old English, infinitives were single words ending in -n or -an (comparative to modern Dutch and German -n, -en). Gerunds were formed using to followed by a verbal noun in the dative case, which ended in -anne or -enne (e.g. tō cumenne = 'coming, to come'). In Middle English, the bare infinitive and the gerund coalesced into the same form ending in -(e)n (e.g. comen 'come'; to comen 'to come'). The 'to' infinitive was not split in Old or Early Middle English. The first known example of a split infinitive in English, in which a pronoun rather than an adverb splits the infinitive, is in Layamon's Brut (early 13th century): This may be a poetic inversion for the sake of meter, and therefore says little about whether Layamon would have felt the construction to be syntactically natural. However, no such reservation applies to the following prose example from John Wycliffe (14th century), who often split infinitives: After its rise in Middle English, the construction became rare in the 15th and 16th centuries. William Shakespeare used it once, or perhaps twice. The uncontroversial example appears to be a syntactical inversion for the sake of meter: Edmund Spenser, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and the King James Version of the Bible used none, and they are very rare in the writing of Samuel Johnson. John Donne used them several times, though, and Samuel Pepys also used at least one. No reason for the near disappearance of the split infinitive is known; in particular, no prohibition is recorded. Split infinitives reappeared in the 18th century and became more common in the 19th.Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, and Willa Cather are among the writers who used them. Examples in the poems of Robert Burns attest its presence also in 18th-century Scots: In colloquial speech the construction came to enjoy widespread use. Today, according to the American Heritage Book of English Usage, 'people split infinitives all the time without giving it a thought'. In corpora of contemporary spoken English, some adverbs such as always and completely appear more often in the split position than the unsplit.