After communion, our priest invites the extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion “please to come forward.” Perhaps the regularity of his invitation allowed my ear to catch that he never splits the infinitive! Week after week, the “to” always comes out next to “come,” and the “please” precedes them both (instead of coming between them, as one expects). I am fairly certain that in speaking I regularly slice and dice my infinitives, although I try to purge them from my writing.
In H.W. Fowler’s entry on the split infinitive in Modern English Usage, he writes: “The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish.” He amusingly describes those in class (1) as “the vast majority” who “are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes; ‘to really understand’ comes readier to their lips and pens than ‘really to understand’, they see no reason why they should not say it (small blame to them, seeing that reasons are not their critics’ strong point) & they do say it, to the discomfort of some among us, but not to their own.”
For most of my adult writing life, I have fallen into class (3): knowing and condemning. Keeping infinitives together reflects an awareness of grammar, which in today’s education may only come when learning a foreign language that has a single-word infinitive (Latin’s fumare, for example). Yet, as I have recently reflected on the versatility of English’s two-word infinitive, I have slipped into class (5): knowing and distinguishing. Fowler’s entry continues: “We maintain, however, that a real [split infinitive], though not desirable in itself is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, & to patent artificiality. For the first, we will rather write ‘Our object is to further cement trade relations’ than, by correcting into ‘Our object is further to cement . . . ‘, leave it doubtful whether an additional object or additional cementing is the point. And for the second, we take it that such [awkward recasting of sentences] are far more abnormal than the abnormality they evade.” The occasional use of a split infinitive to avoid ambiguity or artificiality still pains me. (I resist the urge to drop a footnote to excuse and explain the usage.) I do, however, find it useful to think of splitting the infinitive as an advantage of the two-word verb form, intrinsic to the language. Why not take advantage of it when appropriate? Thoughts?