Ignorance is Bliss I

I guess a common formative experience for anyone whose formal education extends into their third decade is the return of the first college paper. In my case, after successfully throwing myself through the hoops represented by the Leaving Certificate exam in English (so clearly defined for my cohort that those metaphorical rings might as well have been on fire), I had turned in a paper of a standard similar, I thought, to that churned out in a febrile haze the preceding summer.

Nonchalantly expecting the pat on the head previous efforts had garnered, I was aghast at the blizzard of red ink annotating my text, which was instantly transformed in my eyes into a barbaric scrawl that must have elicited pained groans from its underpaid marker. Among the critical remarks that seemed to eclipse in word count the contents they were supposed to explicate was a cryptic abbreviation attached to an arrow spearing a hapless phrase: “sp. inf.!”

It says something about the calibre of my school education that it took a while (this was pre-Google) for me to learn that this was short for “split infinitive.” It then took even longer for me to find out what a split infinitive is.

I subsequently discovered that in my ignorance I was more in tune with modern usage than the schoolmarmish academic who had inadvertently demonstrated the gap in expectations between school and academic work.

In essence, contemporary pundits argue that to avoid a split infinitive is to crimp your style in obedience to a rule that cannot be broken in the language you are supposed to be emulating. In Latin, as in Romance languages, the infinitive form of a verb is a single word: for example, ire, “to go” (French: aller). In English, as just shown, the form comprises two words because the verb is prefaced by the particle “to.” Apparently, in the 19th century some usage panjandrums argued that muscling in a third word between the two—an “adverbial modifier” as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage describes it—threatened to break the holy bond between “to” and its verb.

The aforementioned Merriam-Webster volume gives its view:

To repeat, the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis. The original cause for complaint was probably awareness of a relatively sudden marked increase in use of the construction, perhaps combined with the knowledge that in those more elegant languages, Latin and Greek, the infinitive is never split—because it is a single word distinguished by its ending rather than by an introductory particle.

But if your initial awareness of a term coincides with your being taken to task for its misuse (even if the correction itself is semi-erroneous), can you ever return to that prelapsarian state of blithely dropping in adverbial modifiers?  Even now, there is a reflexive wariness that steers me “to write cautiously” rather than “to cautiously write.”

But if a correction from long ago can continue to influence your writing style, what effect can mockery have? I’ll take that up in the next post when I address a usage issue where the battle between fundamentalists and modernisers is still being waged.