Lyrics & Knowledge Personal Pages Record Shop Auction Links Radio & Media Kids Membership Help
The Mudcat Cafesj



User Name Thread Name Subject Posted
BuckMulligan How the words change (52* d) RE: How the words change 03 Dec 06


The "rule" about split infinitives was never a rule of the language, it was, and is, and always has been a phony "rule" made up by relatively linguistically ignorant "grammarians" whose notion of "grammar" equated with "latin" in which a split infinitive is an impossibility. English is not, however, an inflective language but a distributive one, in which the only sin in splitting an infinitive is introducing ambiguity. And the sin there is in the ambiguity, not thte split infinitive. Self-consciously unsplit infinitives are far worse than unambiguous split ones. They sound funny. Has nothing to do with "breaking a rule often enough" - that notion just demonstrates unawareness of the fact that languages have their own rules, by which they always operate, and which people can't break. Language is an organic phenomenon of the human psyche, it is not something the human mind designed to follow "rules."


Post to this Thread -

Back to the Main Forum Page

By clicking on the User Name, you will requery the forum for that user. You will see everything that he or she has posted with that Mudcat name.

By clicking on the Thread Name, you will be sent to the Forum on that thread as if you selected it from the main Mudcat Forum page.
   * Click on the linked number with * to view the thread split into pages (click "d" for chronologically descending).

By clicking on the Subject, you will also go to the thread as if you selected it from the original Forum page, but also go directly to that particular message.

By clicking on the Date (Posted), you will dig out every message posted that day.

Try it all, you will see.