tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Mon Feb 22 11:06:10 1999
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Re: ma'veq: It's official
On Sat, 20 Feb 1999 14:04:07 -0800 (PST) Alan Anderson
<[email protected]> 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