Annual Splitting Infinitives Speech

Is it time for my annual “There’s no rule against splitting infinitives” speech already? How time flies. Seems it was just months ago that I was blathering on and on about how it’s a myth that you can’t split an infinitive and that, if you don’t believe a language liberal like me, you can ask Messrs. Strunk and White.

Okay, I’m hamming it up a bit. But it’s just weird to write in a newspaper column perhaps a dozen times that there’s no rule against splitting infinitives and still get e-mails like one I got recently asking about a quote that appeared in the column.

The quote was lifted from another article in which a scientist was talking about proton therapy. He said that this kind of therapy “makes it feasible to just hone in on the actual tumors.”

Notice how there’s a word between “to” and “hone”? Well, so did a reader.

<< Thank you for your enjoyable column in today's paper, "A Misspoken Word Makes a Point." In the quote you use as an example, is it now all right to split infinitives, as in "Proton therapy makes it feasible to just hone in ...?" Maybe precise speech is just a dying entity. I used to collect entertaining malapropisms but there are too many nowadays.>>

So I had to be the heavy again and tell him that something he’s probably accepted as fact for decades is just myth.

<<It's not wrong to split an infinitive. Never has been.>> I wrote back. <<The idea that you can't is a longstanding myth. Garner's Modern American Usage calls it a "superstition." Every language authority under the sun, including Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" agree on this point.>>

And thus, another small-town newspaper reader gets the bad news. One down, five million to go …

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