Читать книгу Bad Advice - John E. McIntyre - Страница 9

Do not split infinitives.

Here we have another superstition rising from the mistaken belief that to be correct, English must be like Latin. In Latin, infinitives are single words and cannot be split. The thinking, if one wishes to call it that, is that the English infinitive, the preposition to plus a verb, must therefore be treated as a unit. Actually, as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage points out, “The term is actually a misnomer, as to is only an appurtenance of the infinitive, which is the uninflected form of the verb.”

Henry Watson Fowler, writing in Modern English Usage nearly a century ago (1926!), pointed out that fussing around with infinitives to avoid splits was highly likely to result in (a) awkward language or (b) outright ambiguity. But this peculiar superstition has got a hold on schoolrooms and editorial offices and will not die.

Bryan A. Garner, in Garner’s Modern English Usage, quotes George Bernard Shaw: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of his time to chasing split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman splits infinitives when the sense demands it. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or quickly to go or to quickly go. The important thing is that he should go at once.”

Raymond Chandler wrote a letter, now famous, to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly in which he complained about the editing of an article: “By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”