| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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1. Grammar: Traditional Rules, Word Order, Agreement, and Case
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| § 59. split infinitive |
| To boldly go where no one has gone before. This phrase, so familiar to Star Trek fans, presents us with the dilemma of the split infinitive—an infinitive that has an adverb between the to and the verb. Split infinitives have been condemned as ungrammatical for nearly 200 years, but it is hard to see what exactly is wrong with saying to boldly go. Its meaning is clear. It has a strong rhythm than reinforces the meaning. And rearranging the phrase only makes it less effective. We may also want to go boldly where no one has gone before, but it doesn’t sound as exciting. And certainly no one wants to go where no one has gone before boldly. That is a different voyage entirely. | 1 |
| In fact, the split infinitive is distinguished both by its length of use and the greatness of its users. People have been splitting infinitives since the 14th century, and some of the most noteworthy splitters include John Donne, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, and Willa Cather. | 2 |
| The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with Latin. The thinking is that because the Latin infinitive is a single word, the English infinitive should be treated as if it were a single unit. But English is not Latin, and people split infinitives all the time without giving it a thought. Should we condemn compound infinitives, such as I want to go and have a look, simply because the infinitive have has no to next to it? | 3 |
| Still, if you dislike infinitives split by adverbs, you can often avoid them without difficulty. You can easily recast the sentence To better understand the miners’ plight, he went to live in their district as To understand the miners’ plight better, he went to live in their district. But as we saw with the Star Trek example, you must be careful not to ruin the rhythm of the sentence or create an unintended meaning by displacing an adverb. | 4 |
| If you plan on keeping your split infinitives, you should be wary of constructions that have more than one word between to and the verb. The Usage Panel splits down the middle on the one-adverb split infinitive. Fifty percent accept it in the sentence The move allowed the company to legally pay the employees severance payments that in some cases exceeded $30,000. But only 23 percent of the panel accepts the split infinitive in this sentence: We are seeking a plan to gradually, systematically, and economically relieve the burden. The panel is more tolerant of constructions in which the intervening words are intrinsic to the sense of the verb. Eighty-seven percent of the panel accepts the sentence We expect our output to more than double in a year. | 5 |
| Remember too that infinitive phrases in which the adverb precedes a participle, such as to be rapidly rising, to be clearly understood, and to have been ruefully mistaken, are not split and should be acceptable to everybody. And don’t be deceived by to-constructions with a gerund, as in He is committed to laboriously assembling all of the facts of the case. Here what is split is not an infinitive but a prepositional phrase. | 6 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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