Wednesday - February 04, 2004

Category Image Splitting Infinitives and Ending with Prepositions


Another blogger caught my attention today and made some comments about grammar, curiously remarking that a split infinitive would be an example of improper English.

But of course, this is all a silly myth. Splitting infinitives is one of the wonderful advantages of our language. The reason that many teachers say otherwise is a very curious relic of the 18th century.

I'm going to quote at length from "The Mother Tongue, English and How it Got that Way" by Bill Bryson.

Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth , an eighteenth century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth that we can trace many a pedant's most treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of two objects," but rather "the heavier," the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can apply only to two things and among to more than two. (By this reasoning, it would not be possible to say that St. Louis is between New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, but rather that it is among them, which would impart a quite different sense.) Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth's many beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative "in solemn and elevated" writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of questionable advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst of literal-mindedness, nineteenth-century academics took it as read that the very name pre-position meant it must come before something – anything.

But then this was a period of the most resplendent silliness, when grammarians and scholars seemed to be climbing over one another (or each other; it doesn't really matter) in a mad scramble to come up with fresh absurdities. This was the age when, it was gravely insisted, Shakespeare's laughable ought to be changed to laugh-at-able and reliable should be made into relionable.

Bryson then goes on to point out how these pedants of the 19th century objected to combining words from different sources to create other words, for instance using the Latin petro and the Greek oleum to form the word petroleum. He continues,

It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions – like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.

I'm having fun quoting this book, I hope Bill Bryson considers this fair use.

Here's a paragraph showing how some things just make no sense about language.

Considerations of what makes for good English of bad English are to an uncomfortably large extent matters of prejudice and conditioning. Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer – surprise, surprise – is that Robert Lowth didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?" – merely a contraction of the same words – is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in "Many people were there"), but not when it is followed by a as in "Many a man was there." There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are.

It just amazes me that this one guy named Lowth, acting completely by himself, had such a big impact on changing the perceived rules of our language. He made these new rules up out of thin air out of a desire to make English conform to Latin. It just goes to show how much bluster and hubris can influence people.

Now, I'm finally getting to the issue of split infinitives. Again Bryson,

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin – a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. . . . But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies.

Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of the split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the early 1980's, he returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a split infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between to and a verb, as in to quickly look.) I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive.

1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.

2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.

It is exceedingly difficult to find any authority who condemns the split infinitive – Theodore Bernstein, H. W. Fowler, Ernest Gowers, Eric Partridge, Rudolph Flesch, Wilson Follett, Roy H. Copperud, and others too tedious to enumerate here all agree that there is no logical reason not to split an infinitive. Otto Jespersen even suggests that, strictly speaking, it isn't actually possible to split an infinitive. As he puts it: " 'To' . . . is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article in an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling 'the good man' a split nominative."

It's a fascinating book. One of the other things I most appreciated learning from this book and others is that we speakers of English are fortunate that we have never found sufficient accord to form an academy (despite many attempts, including one by John Adams and another by John Quincy Adams) for the standardization of the English language. Had we done so, we would likely have language cops like the French and the French Canadians do.

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