Pet peeve

[Peter A. McGraw]

I keep trying to remember or save examples of a pet peeve of mine, and then
I forget or lose them.  Today on NPR as I drove to work I heard a
particularly offensive example and I just KNEW I'd remember it verbatim.
Well, I find I ALMOST remember it.  The phenomenon is a weird "rule" of
English known only to journalists.  I think it must be buried in some style
book that an entire generation of journalism professors pounded into their
students as gospel.  The "rule" is that compound verb forms must never be
separated.  I've noticed it in our local newspaper, and Bob Edwards of
Morning Edition is a particularly slavish practitioner.  The sentence today
was about a California ballot measure: "If passed, Measure XX dramatically
would change the way schools are funded."  (It seems to me it was actually
worse than that--perhaps with three verb forms, but if so I can't remember
them.) This "rule" results in all sorts of sentences that seem to me to
actually break (Oops!  I mean "actually to break") the natural rules of
English syntax.

I once had an editor try to "correct" a sentence in an article I'd written
so that it would become one of these monsters.  I said, "Why?" and she
said, "Split infinitive."  I said, "but that's not an infinitive!"  She
muttered discontentedly but couldn't come up with an argument for that, so
it stayed.

Does any(one/body) know how this got started?  Is it a relic from the days
when English teachers thought English grammar "should" be like Latin?

Peter Mc.

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                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu