Why You Should Boldly Split Infinitives

Have you ever been condemned by a teacher for using a split infinitive? It's one of the stock grammatical no-no's wielded by English teachers. For example, I was once marked down on a paper for splitting an infinitive in this sentence: "Naval forces were eventually able to completely control the Mississippi River." The issue is that "to control" is an infinitive verb, and supposedly it is an error to insert any other words in between "to" and the rest of the verb.

However, this is an artificial "rule" created by grammarians in a misguided attempt to make English more like Latin. The thinking in the 18th/19th centuries went like this: Latin is the most prestigious language in Western culture, and it has a large, complicated grammar with lots of nitpicky rules. English is an upstart language, and if it's going to rise up in the world it needs to be more like Latin. This attitude led to the creation of many stupid and arbitrary grammatical rules; one of them was the split infinitive rule. In Latin, an infinitive verb was a single word; it was impossible to split. Since Latin infinitives were unsplittable, the thinking went, English ones should be too. Thus the rule was born.

However, according to Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage, "there is nothing grammatically wrong with the split infinitive," and it's often the clearest way to say what you want to say. It's also been used since the 13th century and by writers like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. In addition, a split infinitive is essential to the famous Star Trek introductory sequence:

Space... the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.

If you tried to "fix" this split infinitive, you would only screw up this classic line.

Instead, with the facts on your side, you should boldly split infinitives any time you want.