Today's Musing will be unpopular in many corners of this world. I fully expect to be berated, chastised, and scorned. The vitriol will pour forth in nasty comments and hate mail.
D. K. Wall:What? You think I don't receive such things? Why, just the other day, somebody had seen one too many of my photographs of bears on our neighborhood greenway.
D. K. Wall:Now I live in Asheville where bears are a fact of life, somewhere between squirrels and tourists on the local hierarchy. My post usually mentioned that a dog walk required a small detour around a couple of furry locals lounging on the trail.
D. K. Wall:That's it. No editorial. No manifesto. Just bears being bears and me being mildly inconvenienced in the most charming way possible. But this fellow read between lines that didn't exist.
D. K. Wall:I don't know if he thought I was criticizing the bears, if he believed there were too many or too few, or if he suffered from some other undisclosed ursine phobia. His message wasn't clear or coherent, frankly, except for the part where he proclaimed that I was a real POS.
D. K. Wall:Unfortunately, for his desire to insult me, I spent many years in the corporate finance world. We were masters of acronyms, speaking entire sentences in code that no one outside our field could understand.
D. K. Wall:A POS, as all good finance people know, is a point of sale, our fancy term for a cash register. So whatever the complainer's beef with my bears, I pictured him stomping his feet, snorting in rage, and screaming that I was a real cash register.
D. K. Wall:Today's topic though is far touchier than wildlife photography. Worse than debating politics, religion, or the addition of pineapple to pizza. Yes, dear reader. My focus is on grammar. Wait. Don't go. This won't be painful. I promise.
D. K. Wall:The other day, I was innocently scrolling Facebook and happened upon one of my many reader groups. Happy little corners of the Internet where I learn about books I might enjoy.
D. K. Wall:Someone though had posted an image entitled the top 25 grammar errors, prefaced by the explanation that they were a teacher and agreed with every one of them.
D. K. Wall:I shuddered. First, I noted that the list wasn't exactly well researched. Actually, scratch that. I would say it wasn't researched at all.
D. K. Wall:Someone had asked an AI chatbot to vomit out the image and posted it without spending a single second verifying its accuracy. My safe haven of reading had been invaded by AI slop.
D. K. Wall:How do I know? Well, let's start with the fact that the top 25 list contained 21 items.
D. K. Wall:Now I've heard the various ways that people think they can identify AI writing, but I don't agree with all of them. I love a good em dash, and don't you dare try to take them away from me. And I'm fond of a well constructed if then phrase.
D. K. Wall:But miscounting your own top 25 list rather puts the artificial in intelligence. Besides, two of the items were the same rule, just phrased differently. Technically, we're down to 20. And that's before we get to the misspellings.
D. K. Wall:All of that I could have ignored. With a flick of my thumb, I could have scrolled past the way I scroll past so many other piles of garbage that pass for social media.
D. K. Wall:Then I saw number six, never split an infinitive. My skin crawled. My brain froze. My vision tunneled onto the commandment.
D. K. Wall:For those who need a quick refresher, an infinitive is a verb that functions as a noun. Well, usually, but not always, by adding to in front of it. Again, usually, but not always.
D. K. Wall:Let's skip the definition and go straight to the example. He wants to go. Wants is the verb. To go is the infinitive. Simple enough. Right?
D. K. Wall:But sometimes you want to be more explicit. He doesn't just want to go. No. He wants to be dramatic about it. He wants the spotlight. No one should miss his going. He wants to go boldly. Or if he's a Star Trek fan, he wants to boldly go.
D. K. Wall:Warning. Warning. Someone has just split an infinitive. They have dared to plop a word right smack in the midst of that cute little infinitive.
D. K. Wall:To and go can't even see each other with that boldly muddling the middle. The offender should be dragged to the public square and humiliated.
D. K. Wall:After all, it's a rule. Except, it's not. Well, okay, it is.
D. K. Wall:The credit usually goes to Henry Alford, the dean of Canterbury, who published the Queen's English in 1864 with the admonition that there was no good reason to split an infinitive. After all, you didn't do it in Latin.
D. K. Wall:Except, English isn't Latin, and sometimes splitting an infinitive simply makes the sentence flow.
D. K. Wall:Unfortunately, the myth continues. I had an English professor, a doctorate in English, mind you, deduct a point on an exam because I had split an infinitive.
D. K. Wall:He was, to be fair, a terrific professor, funny, witty, the kind of teacher you remember decades later.
D. K. Wall:But on this one point, he was immovable. He told me in no uncertain terms that I was wrong and that a life of despair surely awaited me unless I changed my ways.
D. K. Wall:The split infinitive in question, to boldly go. Yes. I lost a point on arguably the most famous split infinitive in the entire English language delivered in syndication to millions of viewers and on T shirts, coffee mugs, and convention floors ever since.
D. K. Wall:I wasn't quick enough on my feet to argue. I just took the hit and moved on. The way you do when you're 18 and your professor has a PhD and you have a b minus average to protect. Not that I hold a grudge.
D. K. Wall:But the grammar guides, they don't agree with him. The Chicago Manual of Style, the guide most American novels follow, states that in some cases, quote, the split infinitive is justified and often even necessary.
D. K. Wall:Or visit Dreyer's English, which ridicules the rule in its usual biting fashion and closes with the classic Raymond Chandler quote, fired at an editor who dared to unsplit one of his infinitives. I split it, so it will stay split.
D. K. Wall:Chandler's actual phrasing was a touch more colorful involving the Almighty, but I try to keep this family friendly.
D. K. Wall:By the way, I highly recommend Dreyer's English, one of the most genuinely funny books on grammar ever written. And, yes, grammar can be funny, at least the way Benjamin Dreyer writes it.
D. K. Wall:Yes. I know. Someone out there is already firing up the quote from William Strunk's the elements of style, declaring that split infinitives are, quote, avoided by all careful writers.
D. K. Wall:But even Strunk admitted the practice was centuries old even as he looked down his nose at such rubbish.
D. K. Wall:That's really the point. Language exists to communicate, and it evolves with the world it serves. So let's not get too hung up on rules.
D. K. Wall:Sometimes, a sentence simply sounds better with a preposition at the end. And no one is confused when the supermarket express lane is guided by a sign reading 12 items or less.
D. K. Wall:Or maybe they are. Maybe that explains why people with overflowing buggies feel perfectly entitled to enter that line. They're not being ignorant. They're just grammarians.
D. K. Wall:So go ahead. Sling your arrows. Compose your hate mail. Call me a cash register if you must.
D. K. Wall:I plan on continuing to split my infinitives, to dangle the occasional preposition, to end sentences with the rhythm my ear demands rather than the rules a Victorian Dean demanded.
D. K. Wall:In fact, I won't just dare to do it. I will with great enthusiasm and zero apology dare to boldly do it.