{"id":1594,"date":"2009-06-01T00:24:01","date_gmt":"2009-06-01T07:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=1594"},"modified":"2009-06-01T00:24:01","modified_gmt":"2009-06-01T07:24:01","slug":"the-writing-room-splitting-the-infinitive-how-to-boldy-go-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/the-writing-room-splitting-the-infinitive-how-to-boldy-go-there\/","title":{"rendered":"The Writing Room: Splitting the Infinitive — How to Boldy Go There"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Barbara Falconer Newhall<\/em><\/p>\n

I didn’t know — did you? — that until the 19th century it was perfectly okay for writers of English to judiciously split the occasional infinitive.<\/p>\n

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Photo by BF Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For decades now, nitpickers and pedants have been taking exception to that stirring old Star Trek<\/em> slogan, “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”<\/p>\n

It splits\u00a0its infinitive so shamelessly — to<\/em> boldly<\/strong><\/em> go<\/em>. Ouch.<\/p>\n

But Wheaton College’s rhetorician and professor of English, Michael D.C. Drout feels no pain when he hears the familiar Star Trek<\/em>\u00a0slogan. He\u00a0argues that that\u00a0the Star Trek<\/em> writers knew exactly what they were doing when they plopped the\u00a0“boldly” down right between the “to” and the “go.” They\u00a0wanted to send\u00a0 goosebumps of anticipation\u00a0up and down\u00a0the spines of Star Trek fans tuning in to the show — and they did<\/p>\n

(Drout and I are not so happy with the\u00a0 sexist “no man” part of the phrase. But it’s the product of another — albeit not so distant —\u00a0 era, and thus a conversation for another day.)<\/p>\n

Drout points out that reworking the Star Trek motto\u00a0to\u00a0satisfy the pedants takes all the steam out of\u00a0the phrase.\u00a0“Boldly to go where no man has gone before” is clumsy and pretentious. And “To go boldly where no man has gone before” is lame.<\/p>\n

I agree with Drout. Boldly belongs right where it is, in the middle of things, giving some omph to the rather\u00a0pedestrian verb “to go.”<\/p>\n

I often\u00a0find myself splitting an infinitive or two here or there, defying\u00a0what I thought was a venerable rule of English usage — but I always feel some trepidation when I do. Oops, I’ve split an\u00a0infinitive\u00a0again.<\/p>\n

What I didn’t know, and what I’ve just now learned from Prof. Drout while working out on the elliptical machine at the gym and listening to his Modern Scholar lecture series, A Way with Words: Writing, Rhetoric, and the Art of Persuasion<\/em> — what I didn’t know was that English infinitives are made for splitting.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t until the 19th century, Drout says, \u00a0that some prescriptive grammarians<\/a>, believing that\u00a0English should be more like Latin, banished the split infinitive from\u00a0respectable discourse.<\/p>\n

In Latin, they reasoned,\u00a0infinitives are a single word. Currere<\/em> is to run. Vincere<\/em> is to conquer. No way to split those words up with a well chosen adverb, and so the rule was\u00a0applied — needlessly — to English.<\/p>\n

Thanks for the tip, Prof. Drout. From now on, I’m going to boldly go where\u00a0those awesome Star Trek<\/em>\u00a0writers have been going all these years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“To boldly go where no man has gone before.” Nitpickers and pedants take exception to that stirring old Star Trek slogan. I don’t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,52],"tags":[238,66,239,82,240,241,242],"class_list":["post-1594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-writing-reading","category-the-writing-room","tag-grammar","tag-grammar-geeks","tag-michael-dc-drout","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-split-infinitive","tag-star-trek","tag-to-boldly-go"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}