Re: Post #1 on Jean Aitchison and Infinitives

[barbara wolf <lupa@biddeford.com>]

At 08:10 PM 2/23/96 -0500, Bethany wrote:
 Perhaps somebone [sic]else has _Modern English Usage_ handy tonight and
will summarize thearticle for us? Otherwise, expect at least a second post
on this topic.
You are hereby warned.

Have Fowler right at hand.

As to the question of splitters of infinitives, he says that the
English-speaking world can be divided into 5 groups: those who neither know
nor care;those who do not know but care a lot; those who know and condemn;
those who know and approve; andthose who know and distinguish. (And we all
know which group we'd like to be in, don't we?)

To wit:
 1) That happy group of folk who neither know nor care, one way or the
other--this is the majority group.  They don't know what the fuss is about.

2) Those who care but don't know what the split beast is; they distort
sentences as they writhe around to avoid imaginary offenses--sticking
adverbs ANYWHERE except between "to...and the verb", sometimes destroying
coherence in the process. (Fowler give examples and says the reader has to
hunt around to figure out what the adverb is supposed to apply to. [Note
that I end that sentence with a preposition.])

3) Those who do understand exactly what an infinitive is and in trying to
maintain its wholeness will succeed only in fracturing the sense of a
sentence (lovely phrase, don't you think?) or complicating its meaning (as,
in Fowler's ex., "Every effort must be made to increase adequately
professional knowledge and attainments.")  [Bureaucrats love this sort of
sentence.]

4) Those who go right ahead and split the damn things--on purpose, as if to
show that they are not trammeled by convention.  [Like some students I know
who insisted that punctuation is a Personal Gesture.)

5) Those who admit that taking a hatchet to an infinitive is not in and of
itself desirable, but a s.i. is preferable to ambiguity and artificiality.
The trick is to know how to recast a sentence to reunite the infinitive
WITHOUT messing everything up.

Much more to be read in Fowler, of course--and highly entertaining he is.
Hope this can serve to smoothly settle the problem for all who would like to
finally be told how to cope with this thorny issue.
Barbara Wolf

        "But we've got to be careful not to reduce people by cramming
        them in the limits of our understanding, haven't we?"

                                                Reginald Hill