the ramble dump

So I got a collection of marked essays back today. And in one of them, I was picked up on the use of a split infinitive.

The phrase was 'manipulated in order to effectively make Brecht's point'. 'Split infinitive', he notes, underlining it in wiggly red. Yes, well observed. As soon as I start caring about Victorian quibbly bullshit grammar, I'll let you know.

I'd be inclined to agree that sometimes keeping infinitive components adjacent keeps the sentence neater, but both 'effectively to make' or 'to make effectively' cause the above phrase to sound odd to me. Aside from this, it's ultimately a matter of preference, and grammatically it still makes perfect sense the way I did it. If a grammatical rule goes out of its way to fulfill itself at the expense of the original reason for using it--in this case, making the sentence read weirdly for the sake of supposed neatness when it's bloody fine as it is--then there's no point in the grammatical rule.

Next essay, I'm going to split all my infinitives.

# posted by Chris @ 2:39 PM 0 comments