public.logica.com/~stepneys/cyc/s/split.htm -> www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/cyc/s/split.htm
Copperud, and others too tedious to enumerate here all agree that there is no logical reason not to split an infinitive. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes. To the second class, those who do not know but do care, who would as soon be caught putting their knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive but have only hazy notions of what constitutes that deplorable breach of etiquette, this article is chiefly addressed. These people betray by their practice that their aversion to the split infinitive springs not from instinctive good taste, but from tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinion of others; No sensitive ear can fail to be shocked if the following examples are read aloud, by the strangeness of the indicated adverbs. Why on earth, the reader wonders, is that word out of its place? He will find, on looking through again, that each has been turned out of a similar position, viz between the word be and a passive participle. Reflection will assure him that the cause of dislocation is always the same -- all these writers have sacrificed the run of their sentences to the delusion that 'to be really understood' is a split infinitive. Those who presumably do know what split infinitives are, and condemn them, are not so easily identified, since they include all who neither commit the sin nor flounder about in saving themselves from it -- all who combine a reasonable dexterity with acceptance of conventional rules But when the dexterity is lacking disaster follows. It does not add to a writer's readableness if readers are pulled up now and again to wonder -- Why this distortion? That is the mental dialogue occasioned by each of the adverbs in the examples below. It is of no avail merely to fling oneself desperately out of temptation; Sentences must if necessary be thoroughly remodelled instead of having a word lifted from its original place and dumped elsewhere: What alternative can be found which the Pope has not condemned, and which will make it possible to organise legally public worship ? When a man splits an infinitive, he may be doing it unconsciously as a member of our class 1, or he may be deliberately rejecting the trammels of convention and announcing that he means to do as he will with his own infinitives. But, as the following examples are from newspapers of high repute, and high newspaper tradition is strong against splitting, it is perhaps fair to assume that each specimen is a manifesto of independence: It will be found possible to considerably improve the present wages of the miners without jeopardizing the interests of capital. It should be noticed that in these the separating adverb could have been placed outside the infinitive with little or in most cases no damage to the sentence-rhythm (considerably after miners, decisively after power, still with clear gain after be, substantially after rates, and strongly at some loss after strike), so that protest seems a safe diagnosis. The attitude of those who know and distinguish is something like this: We admit that separation of to from its infinitive is not in itself desirable, and we shall not gratuitously say either 'to mortally wound' or 'to mortally be wounded', but we are not foolish enough to confuse the latter with 'to be mortally wounded', which is blameless English nor 'to just have heard' with 'to have just heard', which is also blameless. And for the second, we take it that such reminders of a tyrannous convention as 'in not combining to forbid flatly hostilities' are far more abnormal than the abnormality they evade. We will split infinitives sooner than be ambiguous or artificial; We refuse 'better to equip' as a shouted reminder of the tyranny; After this inconclusive discussion, in which, however, the author's opinion has perhaps been allowed to appear with indecent plainness, readers may like to settle the following question for themselves. Or are we to give him the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that he really meant absurdly to qualify try and badly to qualify tend? It is perhaps hardly fair that this article should have quoted no split infinitives except such as, being reasonably supposed (as in 4) to be deliberate, are likely to be favourable specimens.
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