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Split Infinitives - Are They Okay? 551 Views
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Transcript
- 00:04
Are split infinitives okay?, a la Shmoop. You're on a road trip to Phoenix, and end
- 00:11
up spending the night at the Bates Motel.
- 00:14
When Norman busts in with his knife, do you opt to bravely fight back with your towel
- 00:19
whip... ...your shaving cream...
- 00:21
...or your ability to cunningly split every infinitive in sight?
Full Transcript
- 00:28
Let's start with what an infinitive is. There are two kinds. Bare infinitives are the one-word
- 00:34
verbs you use every day...
- 00:36
...like “shower”, “shave”, and “kill”.
- 00:40
Full infinitives carry a “to” in front of the verb, so you end up with “to shower”,
- 00:45
“to shave”, and “to kill”.
- 00:48
Splitting an infinitive, then, is what happens when you add a word between “to” and the
- 00:53
bare verb attached to it. Grammarians of the nineteenth century would
- 00:56
have destroyed anyone they caught splitting infinitives.
- 00:59
However, those guys are now ghosts... ...and pretty much everyone today agrees that
- 01:04
splitting infinitives is kosher. Let's look at a couple of examples. You could
- 01:09
say, “Norman worked to carefully conceal Marion's body”...
- 01:13
...meaning Norman hid the girl's corpse where no one was ever going to find it.
- 01:18
But what if you didn't split the infinitive in this example?
- 01:22
What if you said instead, “Norman worked carefully to conceal Marion's body”?
- 01:27
The sentence would have a completely different meaning. “Carefully” would be referring
- 01:31
to how Norman worked...
- 01:33
...rather than to how he concealed. Okay, another example. You could say, “Norman
- 01:38
decided to artfully dress as his dead mother.”
- 01:42
If you don't split the infinitive...
- 01:44
...and say instead that “Norman decided artfully to dress as his dead mother”...
- 01:48
...the result is a sentence that doesn't make sense.
- 01:52
There may come a day when you doubt the correctness of splitting infinitives. If so, just remember
- 01:56
this...
- 01:57
...the catch phrase for “Star Trek” is “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
- 02:02
If Gene Roddenberry was allowed to split infinitives, then you get a pass, too.
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