By Anne Trubek. Special to The Plain Dealer.
The rule against split infinitives was invented in 1834. An anonymous author noted in a magazine that people were beginning to randomly split infinitives and decided to tell them not to: "To, which comes before the verb in the infinitive mode, must not be separated from it by the intervention of an adverb."
The author supplies no reason why splitting infinitives is wrong. It may be because he was imposing Latin rules onto English (in Latin, verbs in the infinitive are one word, not two), or it may have been a way to mark social class and separate oneself from the infinitive-splitting rabble.
Truth is, there was, and remains, no good reason why splitting infinitives is wrong.
All grammatical rules are like this one: They are all man-made. So too are spelling conventions.
Some make little sense. Why does "receipt" have a "p" in it whereas "deceit" and "conceit" do not? Why do we abbreviate "shall not" as "shan't" if an apostrophe is supposed to replace one missing letter, as in "don't"
In "The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English from Shakespeare to South Park," Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University, offers an erudite and entertaining history of how our hodgepodge of rules and conventions came to be, and convincingly argues that the only constant in the English language is change.
Lexicographers and linguists divide themselves into two camps, the prescriptivists and the descriptivists. Prescriptivists tell people how to use the language (William Safire was a prescriptivist), whereas descriptivists analyze how language works and how people use it. Descriptivists are often academics.
These factions have long fought over language. A prescriptivist would tell people they are wrong when they use the word peruse to mean "to skim" because the traditional meaning is "to read carefully." A descriptivist would say it is fine to use peruse to mean "to skim" because most people think that is what the word means, and so the meaning of the word has changed. So this verb may now be defined as either "to read carefully" or "to skim."
Lynch walks a sensible line between the two camps in his chapters on the making of early English and American dictionaries, changes in the English alphabet and the standardization of spelling. At root a descriptivist, Lynch admits some prescription is necessary to ensure intelligibility.
This may seem a dry subject, but we are living in a moment of seismic linguistic change, and attention should be paid.
Take the argument that text messaging is corrupting spelling. Lynch argues that the new abbreviations signal evolution, not degradation. After all, he notes, abbreviations are common in "proper" English, too.
OK, the most popular American word in the world, came of age during the telegraph era. And no one considers the abbreviations ASAP or Ph.D. signs of corruption.
"Speaking and writing our own language shouldn't be a chore," Lynch reminds us, adding "we should resist all attempts to make us feel ashamed of speaking the way the rest of the world speaks."
Anne Trubek teaches rhetoric and composition at Oberlin College.