Pet peeve

[Herb Stahlke]

I haven't run into, or at least noticed, this aberration.
However, as others will undoubtedly note, split infinitives are
perfectly acceptable, another 18th c. prescriptivism surviving too
long.  In "would change", by the way, "change" is an infinitive.
Modals take unmarked infinitives.  The "to" is not what makes a
form an infinitive.  It's just one way of marking that status.

Herb Stahlke

>>> pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU 10/31/00 11:59AM >>>
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.

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