I agree with a lot of what Syd Curtis wrote in his posting. Spilt
infinitives aren't a great sin of writing and mostly pass unnoticed. The
split infinitive as a solecism was only diagnosed in the 18th century when
grammarians, embarrassed that English didn't have a cut and dried grammar
like Latin and Greek, tired to invent one for it, thus producing many rulers
that had not troubled earlier writers and speakers (and of course Latin and
(ancient) Greek only had cut and dried grammars because they had been dead
languages for hundreds of years).
However in the example that Syd quotes:
"O'Connor's main piece of advice
is not to split them - "unless your ear tells you otherwise". And he offers
this example:
"I cannot bring myself to really like the bloke."
versus
"I cannot bring myself really to like the bloke."
"The first sounds more natural," says O'Connor, "the meaning is clear and
the violation harmless.""
I think that it would be more natural to write "I really cannot bring myself
to like the bloke", or "I cannot really bring myself to like the bloke".
And I think that if we really look hard the occasions when a split
infinitive threatens only a few of these are necessary at all.
BTW my favourite example of the way that language changes to make useful
distinctions that previous language change has obscured is the Australian
"yous", meaning "you (plural)"; ever since English lost "thou" as the
singualr we have been in need of a distinction between you (singular) and
you (plural). (In the States the emerging plural form is "you-all"). At the
moment neither of these forms is standard, but given time....
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John Leonard (Dr),
PO Box 243,
Woden, ACT 2606
'I thought of New York as a Hemlock forest that had
been logged too heavily....'
Murray Gell-Mann
http://www.spirit.net.au/~jleonard
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