Dear Scott, So you want to clearly understand about split infinitives?

Dear Scott

So you want to clearly understand about split infinitives? And I gather that your concern is to more confidently avoid them in written reports you prepare?

My first piece of advice is to always rely on Fowler.

I don’t suppose I will ever be cast away on a desert island. But if I was, and if I could take just one book with me, it would be a Fowler.

We Fowler-philes – I know of at least one other – tend to think of it in those eponymous terms. In fact the book’s title is A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

HW Fowler was an extraordinary man whose character and work are pleasingly brought to life in The Warden of English by Jenny McMorris. Fowler lived from 1858 to 1933. After twenty years as a secondary school teacher, in 1904 he started work for the Oxford Univ. Press. He was a physical fitness buff who for many years went for a daily run and an ocean swim. He married at 50 and at the age of 56, when war broke out, he wangled his way into the army and demanded to be sent to the front.

The main sources for McMorrris’ biography included the letters Fowler sent to his wife while he was in France during the war. Another was the collection of letters to and from the Oxford Univ. Press during his thirty years of work with it.

Modern English Usage (MEU) is fascinating about the niceties of English and endlessly amusing  – including on the subject of split infinitives.

"The English speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know & condemn; (4) those who know & approve; & (5) those who know & distinguish."

Potential readers of Fowler – who I hope will now include you, Scott – should be aware that one of the reviewers of McMorris’ biography warns that “anyone tempted to dip into MEU itself should be warned that the stamp of Fowler’s heart and mind is faint indeed in the heavily revised 1996 third edition, though it is clear in the 1965 second edition, which remains in print.”

Myself, I have access to “the stamp of Fowler’s heart and mind” through a copy of the first edition, initially published in 1926, and at least one of the second, the 1965 edition. (They can often be found at garage sales and in second hand book stores and should at all costs be preserved and given as gifts to members of the emoji generation.)

My second piece of advice is not to unnecessarily worry about the phenomenon. People split infinitives all the time and, sensibly enough, most listeners and readers are concerned with meaning, not syntax.  Recently I was at the doctor’s to get a repeat prescription. Concerned about how urgent it might be, and referring to a particular medicine, the practice manager said to me: “Have you ran out?” Her meaning was perfectly clear.

To know what a split infinitive is, one first needs to be able to identify an infinitive.

You will remember that verbs are ‘action’ or ‘doing’ or ‘occurrence’ words. Words like run, but also think and smile and reconsider and gamble and recognise. Some verbs are finite, others non-finite; some regular, others irregular; some transitive, others intransitive. But these are different stories; let’s pass over them for now.

All verbs have an infinitive part – which is (in modern parlance!) the ‘money word’ preceded by to. So the infinitives of the verbs just listed are to run, to think, to smile etc.

A split infinitive comes about when, in using the infinitive of a verb, one or more words is placed between the to and the action word. Thus: to regularly run, to immediately think and to charmingly smile are all split infinitives. In all three of these cases the offending word is an adverb, meaning that the phrase remains coherent despite the split infinitive.

If you don’t spot a split infinitive then almost by definition it didn’t do any harm – as long as the author’s intended meaning was conveyed.

If you did spot a split infinitive – as in the first three times the word to is used above in this piece – then there are two questions to ask:

does the splitting of the infinitive damage the meaning or lead to any ambiguity; and

does it result in an inelegant sentence structure, or rhythm, or sound?

It’s often the case that work by an author to undo a split infinitive in a drafted piece results in a sentence that is more elegant, perhaps has more gravitas and style than the one first drafted.

For instance it might have been better for me to have begun this piece as follows:

So you want clearly to understand about split infinitives?

And I gather that your concern is to be more confident at avoiding them in written reports you prepare?

My first piece of advice is this: Always rely on Fowler.

In each of these three cases the split infinitive has been fixed in a different manner: in the first, by reversing the order of the clearly and the to; in the second, by changing some words and the word order; and in the third by recasting the sentence to incorporate a colon.

So spotting the split infinitives in a first draft can be the stimulus or trigger for an author to consider alternative ways of casting the same information. Further consideration of a written draft is a positive thing. Good writing takes time and an author always has the option to consciously retain a split infinitive if doing so creates no stylistic or comprehension problems.