My inner grammarian needs to pick her battles
When it comes to the split infinitive, do you cast caution to the wind and boldly go, or do you pick an audacious path around that particular grammatical bear trap?
I must admit that split infinitives bring out the dual personality in me. My inner grammarian, a stickler who clutches her pearls and shudders whenever she spots some illiteracy in an offspring’s text message, does her level best to avoid splitting the infinitive. That’s mainly because she knows eagle-eyed readers of this column will soon be snatching up the Basildon Bond to gleefully point out her error. Oops… to indicate her error with some enthusiasm.
My writer self, by contrast, wants to split infinitives like billy-o because not splitting them leads to all manner of verbal clumsiness and infelicity. If you are trying to create a frictionless sentence, with no awkward humps or lumps for the reader to stumble over, it’s an absolute pain.
What a relief to hear from researchers at the University of Lancaster that there has been a fourfold increase in the split infinitive since the 1990s. Even if people know what a split infinitive is, it seems they no longer care.
On Woman’s Hour last week, Dame Jenni Murray and I agreed that we both have a pretty strict inner grammarian. She likes standards to be maintained. Quite right, too. But I think the grammarian needs to learn to pick her battles. What’s the point of grumbling about the word order of English when the under-25s all say: “I should of known.”
Now that monstrosity, I am prepared to boldly challenge.