I know, bear with me. Yesterday I posted about the words circled, and margin notes in Louis XIII: The Making of a King. The critical reader has underlined the phrase “To further placate the prince”, and put an exclamation mark in the margin. Clearly he or she is not a fan of split infinitives. To further placate didn’t sound too bad to me. If I’m honest, to boldly go, that famous introduction to Star Trek, never made me wince either.
I did some research on split infinitives. According to the Guardian, Fowler, the acknowledged authority on English usage, says: “The split infinitive is … best avoided, especially when it is stylistically awkward. But it is not a major error nor a grammatical blunder; it is acceptable, even necessary, when consideration of rhythm and clarity require it.”
In the Romance languages verbs are single words which must not be split. It is incorrect to apply that to the English infinitive verb form. As Angelica Goodden, emeritus professor of French at the University of Oxford explains in the same Guardian article, “to hardly try” is correct English, whereas “to try hardly” is nonsense.
So there you are, another myth debunked. I don’t think I’ll start splitting too many infinitives right away. Perhaps it’s that I don’t want to upset the grammar police, even if they’re wrong. I also don’t want to attract negative reviews. If Amazon had been around when the previous owner of the Louis XIII biography got so upset, I’m sure that he or she would have posted a bad review. But, if stylistically necessary, I won’t shrink from it either. I wonder how much more of what I was taught at school is wrong? Incidentally, Mr Goodden was my form master and chemistry teacher at school. I wonder if he and the Oxford professor are related?