Being Mr. Kenny

While I heartily enjoy correcting people’s grammar and laughing at spelling mistakes, just like any good Englishman should, I do find a few of the rules of English grammar a little annoying. Namely, the rule against split infinitives and the rule against putting prepositions at the end of the sentence.

The infinitive is that form of the verb which is not marked for number, tense, mood or person. I.e. it’s the verb in its purest state, it’s just the verb on it’s own before people or time have happened to it, like “eat” or “sleep” or “write” (as opposed to “eats, eaten, eating, ate”, “sleeps, slept, sleeping”, “writes, written, writing, wrote” etc).

In English, the infinitive often takes the form “to go”, “to play” etc, and you’re not supposed to put any words between “to” and the verb. Thus, “to boldy go” should be either “boldy to go” or “to go boldly”, both of which sound a little ridiculous. It’s also strictly not correct: “to” is not part of the infinitive, it’s just a connecting word. You don’t find it in sentences about the future which use the infinitive, such as “I will eat”.

Prepositions are words like at, to, before, about, for, with, and you’re not supposed to finish a sentence with them. Thus it is not “What are you looking at?” but “At what are you looking?”.

These rules came about because some guy decided that English should be more like Latin, where the word order is completely different. Take for example, the sentence “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”. Literally translated, this reads (with a few words added to make sense): “Sweet and fitting is it, for your country to die”. Who speaks like that? English is a language with many roots, only one of which is Latin.*

As Harry Hutton writes, no sane man cares about such things!

Let’s take a well-known example of a supposedly incorrect sentence:

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Here we have two errors: there is a split infinitive (“to boldy go”) and the a preposition (“before”) is at the end of the sentence. Rewriting it to make it obey the rules of English grammar:

To go boldly to those places to which, before now, no man has gone.

As you can plainly see, the sentence is now damaged. It has lost some of it’s readability and all of its impact. Ironically, it now also sounds incorrect due to the awkward phrasing. Correcting that would mean adding even more words, thereby destroying whatever dynamic effect it once had. I think this example is a good instance of where the style of the language is ciritical to its effectiveness. “To boldly go” needs to be short and punchy, else it fails to inspire.

I would say that these rules are good in that they allow you subtle control over style and emphasis, but they shouldn’t be enforced as mandatory. In my opinion, they are optional in modern English, in all but the most formal writing styles. And you certainly shouldn’t think twice about splitting an infinitive in your speech, or allowing the last word you say to be a preposition. I notice that Oxford agrees with me.

You can read more about Robert Lowth on Wikipeda, as ever. It was he who introduced Latin rules to English grammar.

* Here you will note that the sentence doesn’t end with a preposition. How ironic!