DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language ...

Geoffrey Pullum (Language Log) has long railed against the no-split-infinitives demand; his latest focuses on this passage from the militantly anti-split-infinitive Economist: At a computer-security ...

Now that you have freed prepositions to bravely be sentence endings, you might clarify Miss Thistlebottom’s split infinitive rule. — Pam Rider, East Village, San Diego Joining the preposition rule in ...

Reader Don in Los Angeles County wrote recently with a question about a well-known grammar issue called a “split infinitive.” “I learned about them 50 years ago and I am somewhat sensitive about them ...

Today we're gonna talk about split infinitives. First of all, what is an infinitive? It's a form of the verb that has to in front of it. And it doesn't indicate anything about tense or about person or ...

Nairobi — English has no formal infinitives. We recognise one only by the word "to" before a verb. But since the word is separate from the verb, why is it wrong to "split" the infinitive? Our high ...

SPLIT infinitives. Can't live with them, can't live without them. But what on earth is one, and should we care that much? Here beginnith the lesson. The infinitive is the part of the verb expressed by ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...