DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language ...
Now that you have freed prepositions to bravely be sentence endings, you might clarify Miss Thistlebottom’s split infinitive rule. — Pam Rider, East Village, San Diego Joining the preposition rule in ...
A recent comment thread brought up the old debate about split infinitives. I’m for them, in the sense that I think there is nothing inherently ungrammatical or even clumsy about them. Sometimes they ...
A reader asked me whether splitting infinitives is grammatically correct. Most modern authorities say it is, but I recommend that you don’t spilt infinitives because it may irritate judges who were ...
Today we're gonna talk about split infinitives. First of all, what is an infinitive? It's a form of the verb that has to in front of it. And it doesn't indicate anything about tense or about person or ...
Time travel always seemed to me a silly idea — at least as it’s portrayed in movies and on TV. Sure, it’s fun to ponder whether a guy can be his own grandpa. But time-travel movies always fall apart ...
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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on ...
Geoffrey Pullum (Language Log) has long railed against the no-split-infinitives demand; his latest focuses on this passage from the militantly anti-split-infinitive Economist: At a computer-security ...
THE first element of good style is clearness, and this may or may not be combined with literary elegance. It is usual to regard a split infinitive as a sign of indifference to pure English, yet this ...
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