Split Infinitives Should Embarrass You
Read the following language carefully:
One of the four inquiries articulated by the court was whether “the plaintiff seek[s] to compel the defendant to affirmatively provide housing for members of minority groups or merely to restrain the defendant from interfering with individual property owners who wish to provide such housing.” Metro. Hous. Dev. Corp. v. Vill. of Arlington Heights, 558 F.2d 1283, 1290 (7th Cir. 1977).
Did you notice the split infinitive? If you did, were you bothered by it? If so, is your trepidation worsened by the fact that this solecism was actually penned by a federal appellate judge? If your answer to any of the foregoing questions was “no,” you should be ashamed of yourself. But if you keep reading, there is hope for you.
The split infinitive in the above example consists of the words “to affirmatively provide.” Whenever you see the word “to” immediately followed by an uninflected verb (like “provide”), you’re dealing with a full infinitive—the proper grammatical arrangement. But when an adverb or adverbial phrase comes between the word “to” and the bare infinitive, you have cause for alarm: you have encountered a split infinitive.
How many split infinitives did Shakespeare use? Only one, and it was for rhyming purposes. And you won’t find a single split infinitive in the works of other notable rhymesters like Alexander Pope (my favorite), John Dryden, and Edmund Spenser. Care to guess how many there are in the King James Bible? That’s right, none—or I would have stopped reading ere Cain slew Abel. Yet other authors have slipped up from time to time, including Wordsworth, Eliot, and (to the chagrin of all who share Scottish roots) Robert Burns—though the latter seems to have been tasteful enough to limit his use of the error to lines whose meter could not otherwise be saved. And apparently, even learned judges have stumbled into using split infinitives.
So how should the court have worded the above language? Most simply, it could have omitted the word “affirmatively” altogether. Understandably, the court wanted to distinguish between claims seeking the actual provision of housing by defendants and those merely seeking an injunction against defendants who would interfere with providers of housing. However, the distinction would have been clear without the word “affirmatively,” because of the contrast provided by the phrases “compel the defendant” and “or merely to restrain the defendant.”
I’m going to tell you the easiest way to discern when the word splitting an infinitive is downright unnecessary: try moving it around to different places in the sentence. If the adverb or phrase doesn’t seem to fit anywhere without making you sound like a clown, you don’t need it at all. If the adverb is truly essential to conveying the meaning you intend, you’ll find another place for it in the sentence. In the example above, the word “affirmatively” doesn’t work anywhere.
You won’t find advice this good in the Bluebook itself: don’t split your infinitives.
I demur; one of the beauties of the English language is its malleability. I can think of no reason to unnecessarily suppress a writer’s creativity by prohibiting split infinitives. Did you notice the split infinitive in the last sentence? Did you further notice that the adverb “unnecessarily” (1) is necessary to the sentence’s meaning, and (2) could not be moved anywhere else in the sentence without making the writer sound like a “clown”?
Sir, you are wrong on all counts.
First, in your sentence, the word “unnecessarily” is not only unnecessary, but also a poor choice of words. Think about what you are attempting to communicate with that sentence. You are saying “[there is] no reason to . . . suppress a writer’s creativity by prohibiting split infinitives.” Adding the word “unnecessary” here is not necessary at all, for doing so merely creates a tautology: of course you would think the prohibition on split infinitives is “unnecessary” if you believe there is “no reason” to forbid them.
Second, if the word were indeed “necessary to the sentence’s meaning,” it could easily be moved to follow the word “creativity.” And if you think fixing a grammatical error in this fashion makes you sound like a clown, I should probably clarify for you that the “clown standard” is an objective one, not subjective. A true clown, after all, will fail to understand the problem with split infinitives in the first place, so he will be doubly perplexed if he attempts to revise his sentences in such a manner as to avoid revealing his prosaic handicap.