To Safely Split Infinitives

It’s an exciting time for linguistic nerds (and yes, that type of person exists). Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and pop science author, just published a new style guide, “The Sense of Style.” Pinker is an expert at distilling complicated bits of linguistics and making it useful and informative for people who have no background in it. He’s a favorite among armchair linguists (like many copywriters). Pinker brings a refreshing, modern sensibility to a community that’s been historically populated by curmudgeons, hopelessly stuck in the past.

Pinker bases his usage arguments in in linguistics and cognitive sciences, and in his book, urges people to at least question grammatical sticklers. In his usage guide, he makes claims that many of these sticklers will have problems with: namely, that it’s permissible to split infinitives. Infinitives are the basic, dictionary forms of verbs. To run, to go, to eat and to walk are all infinitive forms. For a long time, it’s been considered a grammatical error to split the infinitive, or, to insert a word between the to and the verb.

The most famous example of a split infinitive is the intro to the Star Trek TV show: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” In this instance, the adverb “boldly” divides (or splits) the original infinitive, “to go.” While traditionalists would argue that “to go boldly” is the more grammatically correct phrase, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who preferred the latter.

Pinker’s claim represents a sea change in popular attitudes towards form and function of language: While grammatical “fascism” is a fun party trick for a certain kind of pedant, it’s not always justified, and no one should be cowed into not questioning language dogma:

“We live in an age of a scientific mindset. It’s not enough to say ‘this is wrong because I said it’s wrong.’ A skeptical reader says, ‘Says who? Who decides? What gives you the right to boss me around as to how I speak? Asking that question doesn’t mean that the answer is ‘anything goes, no one is in charge, write however you please,” it does mean that what advice you do give ought to be justified.”

Much to the chagrin of traditionalists, Pinker also argues for beginning sentences with conjunctions and well as ending sentences with prepositions. Let the linguist wars begin!