why to never split infinitives

By Todd Stadler · Tuesday, August 21, 2001 11:21pm

I'm reading Lapsing Into a Comma, a style manual of sorts that manages to be pretty entertaining in parts. I'm not given to reading normal style manuals, such as the Associated Press one, but when my friend Morgan read me some passages from this one, we laughed.

Mind you, nothing in this entry, much less this website (excuse me, web site) should be construed as adhering to this or any other style manual. But that should be self-obvious.

Still, I find myself learning a few tips on language, against my will. Oh, who am I kidding? I like grammar when I'm right. It's when I want to bend the rules that the prescriptivists really grate on my nerves.

One thing that made me laugh came in an aside titled "Arbitrary Capitalization", subtitled "After playing Chess, let's have a Turkey Sandwich", which read, in part, thusly:

To review, capital letters (aside from sentence beginnings, titles, up-style headlines and the like) are reserved for proper nouns. And you know how testy I get about lowercased proper nouns.

I must confess, by the way, that as a member of the Ironic Postmodern Generation, I tend to capitalize Grand Concepts, which usually translates to Concepts That Aren't Really Grand but Pretend to Be. This habit, annoying as it may be, has Nothing to Do with arbitrary capitalization.

I'm really glad he addressed that. I've been doing that for a while now, and I'm sure I picked it up while reading some slacker text, but I wasn't sure how widespread the practice was. It also warms my heart to know that even authors of style manuals do silly things.