Re: ma'veq: It's official

["William H. Martin" <whm2m@server1.mail.virginia.edu>]

On Sat, 20 Feb 1999 14:04:07 -0800 (PST) Alan Anderson 
<aranders@netusa1.net> wrote:
...
> >"These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise... (you know it) ... and
> >to boldly go where no one has gone before."
> >
> >There's some more incorrectness for you. One can't split an infinitive like
> >that.
> 
> "Never split infinitives" is one of the "rules of grammar" that really
> isn't a rule.  It's something that started as a style guideline and made it
> into the textbooks, and has been drilled into countless students' heads by
> well-meaning but misguided teachers.  (Now that it's programmed into
> Microsoft Word, we'll probably never be rid of it.)

I agree completely. To passively accept this rule that one is to 
never split an infinitive is to recklessly abandon precious 
opportunities to clearly express precise meaning. {{:)>

> Patrick Stewart as Picard (note spelling) did it for continuity, not for
> emphasis.  It was originally William Shatner's line, nearly two decades
> earlier.  Shatner didn't do it for "emphasis" either.  The speech is
> written that way to have a consistent style.  "To explore...to seek out...
> to boldly go...."  To insist on putting the adverb before the infinitive
> would break the pattern, and it still wouldn't make it any more
> grammatically correct than it already is.

But I always wanted it to follow the verb:

"To explore... to seek out... to go boldly where no one had gone 
before." I can even hear Picard's voice rumbling on the word 
"boldly" so spoken. Ahhh, but who listens to me?
 
> -- ghunchu'wI'

charghwI' 'utlh