Today's non sequitur

Herb Stahlke hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
Wed Mar 6 02:59:07 UTC 2013


Did Yahoo News give a source?  David Mulroy made this case in his *War
against Grammar* (Heinemann 2003).


On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Today's non sequitur
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From Yahoo! News: The Week:
>
> The rule against splitting infinitives =97 that is, putting an adverb
> betwe=
> en
> the word *to* and a verb =97 was pretty much made up out of whole cloth by
> early 19-century grammarians, apparently because they felt the proper model
> for English was Latin, and in Latin, infinitive-splitting is impossible.
> However, English is not Latin, and infinitives have been profitably split
> by many great writers, from Hemingway ("But I would come back to where it
> pleases me to live; to really live") to Gene Rodenberry  ("to boldly go
> where no man has gone before"). It's okay to boldly do it.
>
> SEE MORE: Prostitute claims she made up accusations against Sen. Robert
> Menendez.
>
>
> JL
>
> --=20
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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