I know, I know, I said that I wasn’t gonna post no more this week . . . .
Yet, as the resident (alleged) Grammer God, I must take issue with one of John Derbyshires‘ recent comments to KJL on “The Corner”:
And I have noticed that you [KJL] have a tendency to split infinitives. Please be more careful!
The implication is that it’s wrong to split infinitives. To this I say the following: Fah!
You should avoid splitting infinitives as a matter of tone, clarity and (usually) cadence, of course, but the mere fact that you’ve split an infinitive is not itself evidence of a grammatical error. (So sayeth my avatars, Strunk & White.) Moreover, there are times when — because of cadence or emphasis — it would be incorrect not to split an infinitive. For example, if you were advertising a 60s western set aboard a interstellar starship, you’d have to be quite insane to prefer the catchphrase “To Go Boldly” over “To Boldly Go”. After all, “boldly” is what the “going’s” all about.*
I thought that this rare disagreement of mine with the Derb would be worth noting to the readership; after all, the Derb and I tend to think exactly alike — save for the minor differences in approach that naturally arise from the fact that I’m a rational human being, and he’s not. (Or, at least, not a human being.**)
von
*BTW, I’m well aware that any post by me on grammer is inevitably riddled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and poor turns of phrase. It is The First Law of Von.
**Bonus grammatical error!
I always liked what Churchill said about prepositions at the end of sentence: “They are something up with which I cannot put!”
There were other choices e.g. “Boldly to go, etc.”
But there is actually an issue lurking here. Some of the grammatical errors our primary school teachers have complained about viz. split infinitives, ending a sentence with a preposition, are not violations of English grammar. They’re violations of the Latinized English foisted upon us by James I’s scholars. It’s never totally caught on amongst us groundlings but it’s been the gold standard among scholars for nearly 500 years.
Actually, I ought to point out, as someone born and bred in England, that American English is a lot more conventional than British English. This tends to be the case when people move away from a country and keep the language; it doesn’t evolve as much as it does in the original country.
Of course, those who codified American English in your country really pushed things much more than has been the case in other former colonies. Happily, the influx of Afro-Caribbean and Latino people has jolted the language out of the 18th century.
I’m serious – you may think we British speak in a more stultified manner than you do, but we ditched so many of the words you guys still use ages ago. ‘Gotten’ sounds positively archaic to us.
It’s like German and the Germanic elements in English; when German began to infilitrate the language spoken in England, many centuries ago, the sounds were engraved, and didn’t alter, whereas they did, over time, in Germany, with the result that the ‘t’ sound in Germanic English, the descendant tongue, was kept, but changed to an ‘s’ sound in the original – e.g. ‘water’ becoming ‘wasser’. Change tends to happen less in a language when it has been exported.
Yes. This is English, not Latin, for God’s sake — where’s it’s meaningless anyway.
Bastard. You’re just trolling for us Spelling Godz, aren’t you?
“I thought that this rare disagreement of mine with the Derb would be worth noting to the readership; after all, the Derb and I tend to think exactly alike….”
Are you familiar with his views on the perverted nature of homosexuality and homosexuals?
“I always liked what Churchill said about prepositions at the end of sentence: ‘They are something up with which I cannot put!'”
That’s, alas, quite incorrect. Garbled.
His point was the opposite. When an eager copyeditor “corrected” a sentence of his which ended in a preposition, he steted it, and noted “up with this I will not put!”
Believe me, this story is extremely well known in professional editing circles.
See also here.
Either Google doesn’t do recursion, or they haven’t yet been updated. There’s potential for more than a little mischief, here.
But that’s probably ABD.
Change tends to happen less in a language when it has been exported.
I don’t believe this is the case — language changes, no matter its source. Certainly the same language can change in different ways in different communities, however, so one community will hold on to features that another one discards, and vice versa.
“Either Google doesn’t do recursion, or they haven’t yet been updated. There’s potential for more than a little mischief, here.”
Lileks had a post a while ago about how he HATED it when he googled on something and found himself as the top link. I seem to recall him saying there ought to be a word for that, but I couldn’t swear to it.
Have you read this, by the way? I recommend it.
But that’s probably ABD.
Funny, so am I…
Another interesting thing about the kind of person who delights in pointing out grammatical “errors” like split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions is the frequency with with they misspell the word “grammar” in their “corrections”.
(I honestly can’t tell if the misspelling in the original post was meant to be ironic.)
(I honestly can’t tell if the misspelling in the original post was meant to be ironic.)
Big Ben —
Note the footnote:
“I’m well aware that any post by me on grammer is inevitably riddled with grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and poor turns of phrase. It is The First Law of Von.”
And I have noticed that you [JD] have a tendency to be a bigoted moron. Please be more careful!
To boldly post this to the Corner is a secret dream of mine.