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Split Infinitives - Are They Okay? 549 Views


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00:04

Are split infinitives okay?, a la Shmoop. You're on a road trip to Phoenix, and end

00:11

up spending the night at the Bates Motel.

00:14

When Norman busts in with his knife, do you opt to bravely fight back with your towel

00:19

whip... ...your shaving cream...

00:21

...or your ability to cunningly split every infinitive in sight?

00:28

Let's start with what an infinitive is. There are two kinds. Bare infinitives are the one-word

00:34

verbs you use every day...

00:36

...like “shower”, “shave”, and “kill”.

00:40

Full infinitives carry a “to” in front of the verb, so you end up with “to shower”,

00:45

“to shave”, and “to kill”.

00:48

Splitting an infinitive, then, is what happens when you add a word between “to” and the

00:53

bare verb attached to it. Grammarians of the nineteenth century would

00:56

have destroyed anyone they caught splitting infinitives.

00:59

However, those guys are now ghosts... ...and pretty much everyone today agrees that

01:04

splitting infinitives is kosher. Let's look at a couple of examples. You could

01:09

say, “Norman worked to carefully conceal Marion's body”...

01:13

...meaning Norman hid the girl's corpse where no one was ever going to find it.

01:18

But what if you didn't split the infinitive in this example?

01:22

What if you said instead, “Norman worked carefully to conceal Marion's body”?

01:27

The sentence would have a completely different meaning. “Carefully” would be referring

01:31

to how Norman worked...

01:33

...rather than to how he concealed. Okay, another example. You could say, “Norman

01:38

decided to artfully dress as his dead mother.”

01:42

If you don't split the infinitive...

01:44

...and say instead that “Norman decided artfully to dress as his dead mother”...

01:48

...the result is a sentence that doesn't make sense.

01:52

There may come a day when you doubt the correctness of splitting infinitives. If so, just remember

01:56

this...

01:57

...the catch phrase for “Star Trek” is “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

02:02

If Gene Roddenberry was allowed to split infinitives, then you get a pass, too.

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