[Julie Steiner]

This really ought to be the motto of Eratosphere:

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”
--Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

No less a curmudgeon than the legendary grammarian H.W. Fowler wrote that he did not consider split infinitives and final prepositions to be incorrect usages. He characterized the prohibitions on both as "superstitions" and "fetishes," and complained that the syntactical gyrations to avoid these supposed crimes almost invariably lead to uglier writing, not more graceful. (I'll try to dredge up his exact wording--it's hilarious.)

As threatened, below are some relevant quotations from H.W. Fowler. I'll break them up into individual posts, mostly for my own convenience in pointing people to them when they tell me not to split infinitives or end sentences with prepositions. Heh.

These quotations are from A Dictionary of Modern Usage, Second Edition, by H.W. Fowler, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, 1965—first edition was 1926). I must confess that I only have the 1965 edition and cannot compare Gower's emended text to Fowler's original. Fowler is probably more famous for a book he wrote in 1908 with his brother, called The King's English, which also has some very witty stuff about some of the same topics.

I realize that not everyone will find Fowler as entertaining as I did, but I laughed out loud at some the following.

I'll start with the matter that kicked off this thread. Here's the article for "a, an," which appears on page 1 of A Dictionary of Modern Usage, Second Edition, by H.W. Fowler, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, 1965—first edition was 1926):

a, an. 1. A is used before all consonants except silent h (a history, an honor); an was formerly usual before an unaccented syllable beginning with h and is still often seen and heard (an historian, an hotel, an hysterical scene, an hereditary title, an habitual offender). But now that the h in such words is pronounced the distinction has become anomalous and will no doubt disappear in time. Meantime speakers who like to say an should not try to have it both ways by aspirating the h. [...]

There's also this note in the article for "historic(al)":

[...]Although both adjectives are now always aspirated when not preceded by the indefinite article, the use of an with them lingers curiously. See A, AN.

[Julie Steiner]

Here's the article for "fetishes," which appears on page 196 of A Dictionary of Modern Usage, Second Edition, by H.W. Fowler, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, 1965—first edition was 1926):

fetishes, or current literary rules and conventions misapplied or unduly revered. Among the more notable or harmful are: SPLIT INFINITIVE; FALSE QUANTITY; avoidance of repetition (see ELEGANT VARIATION); the rule of thumb for WHICH WITH AND OR BUT; a craze for native English words (see SAXONISM); pedantry on the foreign pronunciation of foreign words (see DIDACTICISM and FRENCH WORDS 2); the notion that ALTERNATIVES cannot be more than two, that NONE must have a singular verb and that RELIABLE, AVERSE to, and DIFFERENT to are marks of the uneducated; the rule of thumb for and and or in ENUMERATION FORMS; the dread of a PREPOSITION AT THE END; the idea that successive metaphors are mixed METAPHOR; the belief that common words lack dignity (see FORMAL WORDS). See also SUPERSTITIONS.

And here's the article for "superstitions," which appears on pages 606-607:

superstitions. 'It is wrong to start a sentence with "But". I know Macaulay does it, but it is bad English. The word should either be dropped entirely or the sentence altered to contain the word "however".' That ungrammatical piece of nonsense was written by the editor of a scientific periodical to a contributor who had found his English polished up for him in proof, and protested. Both parties being men of determination, the article got not further than proof.

It is wrong to start a sentence with 'but'! It is wrong to start a sentence with 'and'! It is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition! It is wrong to split an infinitive! See the article FETISHES for these and other such rules of thumb and for references to articles in which it is shown how misleading their sweet simplicity is; see also the article SUBSTITUTE for an illustration of the havoc that is wrought by unintelligent applications of an unintelligent dogma.

The best known of such prohibitions is that of the SPLIT INFINITIVE, and the hold of that upon the journalistic mind is well shown in the following, which may be matched almost daily. The writer is reporting a theatre decree for hat-removal: '...the Management relies on the cooperation of the public to strictly enforce this rule.' Even a split infinitive (he comments) may be forgiven in so well-intentioned a notice. Theatre-managers are not stylists; the split this manager has perpetrated, is it not a little one? and to put him, irrelevantly, in the pillory for it betrays the journalist's obsession.

Well, beginners may sometimes find that it is worth as much as their jobs are worth to resist their editors' edicts, as the champion of 'But' did. On the other hand, to let oneself be so far possessed by blindly accepted conventions as to take a hand in enforcing them on other people is to lose the independence of judgement that would enable one to solve the numerous problems for which there are no rules of thumb.

[Julie Steiner]

Here's the entry for "preposition at the end," which appears on pages 473-475 of A Dictionary of Modern Usage, Second Edition, by H.W. Fowler, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, 1965—first edition was 1926):

preposition at the end. It was once a cherished superstition that prepositions must be kept true to their name and placed before the word they govern in spite of the incurable English instinct for putting them late ('They are the finest timber to make great politics of' said Bacon; and 'What are you hitting me for?' says the modern schoolboy). 'A sentence ending in a preposition is an inelegant sentence' represents what used to be a very general belief, and it is not yet dead. One of its chief supports is the fact that Dryden, an acknowledged master of English prose, went through all his prefaces contriving away the final prepositions that he had been guilty of in his first editions. It is interesting to find Ruskin almost reversing this procedure. In the text of the Seven Lamps there is a solitary final preposition to be found, and no more; but in the later footnotes they are not avoided (Any more wasted words...I never heard of. / Men whose occupation for the next fifty years would be the knocking down every beautiful building they could lay their hands on). Dryden's earlier practice shows him following the English instinct; his later shows him sophisticated with deliberate latinism: 'I am often put to a stand in considering whether what I write be the idiom of the tongue,...and have no other way to clear my doubts but by translating my English into Latin'. The natural inference from this would be: you cannot put a preposition (roughly speaking) later than its word in Latin, and therefore you must not do so in English. Gibbon improved upon the doctrine, and, observing that prepositions and adverbs are not always easily distinguished, kept on the safe side by not ending sentences with on, over, under, or the like, even when they would have been adverbs.

The fact is that the remarkable freedom enjoyed by the English in putting its prepositions late and omitting its relatives is an important element in the flexibility of the language. The power of saying A state of dejection such as they are absolute strangers to (Cowper) instead of A state of dejection of an intensity to which they are absolute strangers, or People worth talking to instead of People with whom it is worth while to talk, is not one to be lightly surrendered. But the Dryden-Gibbon tradition has remained in being, and even now immense pains are sometimes expended in changing spontaneous into artificial English. That depends on what they are cut with is not improved by conversion into That depends on with what they are cut; and too often the lust of sophistication, once blooded, becomes uncontrollable, and ends with, That depends on the answer to the question as to with what they are cut. Those who lay down the universal principle that final prepositions are 'inelegant' are unconsciously trying to deprive the English language of a valuable idiomatic resource, which has been used freely by all our greatest writers except those whose instinct for English idiom has been overpowered by notions of correctness derived from Latin standards. The legitimacy of the prepositional ending in literary English must be uncompromisingly maintained; in respect of elegance or inelegance, every example must be judged not by any arbitrary rule, but on its own merits, according to the impression it makes on the feeling of educated English readers.

In avoiding the forbidden order, unskilful handlers of words often fall into real blunders (see OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN). A few examples of bad grammar obviously due to this cause may fairly be offered without any suggestion that the rule is responsible for all blunders made in attempting to keep it. The words in brackets indicate the avoided form, which is not necessarily the best, but is at least better than that substituted for it:

* The War Office does not care, the Disposal Board is indifferent, and there is no one on whom to fix the blame or to hang (no one to fix the blame on or to hang).
* The day begins with a ride with the wife and as many others as want to ride and for whom there is horseflesh available (and as there are horses for).
* This was a memorable expedition in every way, greatly appreciated by the Japanese, the Sinhalese, the Siamese, and with whomever else B.O.A.C. briefly deposited their valuable cargo (and whomever else B.O.A.C. briefly deposited their valuable cargo with).
* It is like the art of which the Huysmans dreamed but never executed (the art that Huysmans dreamed of).
* That promised land for which he was to prepare, but scarcely to enter (that he was to prepare for).

It was said above that almost all our great writers have allowed themselves to end a sentence or a clause with a preposition. A score or so of specimens follow ranging over six centuries, to which may be added the Bacon, Cowper, and Ruskin examples already given:

* (Chaucer) But yit to this thing ther is yit another thing y-ijoigned, more to ben wondred upon.
* (Spencer) Yet childe ne kinsman living had he none / To leave them to.
* (Shakespeare) Such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on.
* (Jonson) Prepositions follow sometimes the nouns they are coupled with.
* (Bible) I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.
* (Milton) What a fine conformity it would starch us all into.
* (Burton) Fit for a Calphurnius and Democritus to laugh at.
* (Pepys) There is good ground for what he goes about.
* (Congreve) And where those qualities are, 'tis pity they should want objects to shine upon.
* (Swift) The present argument is the most abstracted that ever I engaged in.
* (Defoe) Avenge the injuries...by giving them up to the confusions their madness leads them to.
* (Burke) The less convincing on account of the party it came from.
* (Lamb) Enforcing his negation with all the might...he is master of.
* (DeQuincey) The average, the prevailing tendency, is what we look at.
* (Landor) The vigorous mind has mountains to climb, and valleys to repose in.
* (Hazlitt) It does for something to talk about.
* (Peacock) Which they would not otherwise have dreamed of.
* (Mill) We have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of.
* (Kinglake) More formidable than any...that Ibrahim Pasha had to contend with.
* (M. Arnold) Let us see what it amounts to.
* (Lowell) Make them show what they are made of.
* (Thackeray) So little do we know what we really are after.
* (Kipling) Too horrible to be trifled with.

If it were not presumptuous, after that, to offer advice, the advice would be this: Follow no arbitrary rule, but remember that there are often two or more possible arrangements between which a choice should be consciously made. If the final preposition that has naturally presented itself sounds comfortable, keep it; if it does not sound comfortable, still keep it if it has compensating vigour, or when among awkward possibilities it is the least awkward. If the 'preposition' is in fact the adverbial particle of a PHRASAL VERB, no choice is open to us; it cannot be wrested from its partner. Not even Dryden could have altered which I will not put up with to up with which I will not put.

[Julie Steiner]

Finally, here's the article for "split infinitive," which appears on pages 579-582 of A Dictionary of Modern Usage, Second Edition, by H.W. Fowler, revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford, 1965—first edition was 1926):

split infinitive. 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.

1. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and 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), and they do say it, to the discomfort of some among us, but not to their own.

2. To the second class, those who do not know but do care, who would as soon be caught putting knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive but have only hazy notions of what constitutes that deplorable breach of etiquette, this article is chiefly addressed. These people betray by their practice that their aversion to the split infinitive springs not from instinctive good taste, but from tame acceptance of the misinterpreted opinion of others; for they will subject their sentences to the queerest distortions, all to escape imaginary split infinitives. 'To really understand' is a s. i.; 'to really be understood' is a s. i.; 'to be really understood' is not one; the havoc that is played with much well-intentioned writing by failure to grasp that distinction is incredible. Those upon whom the fear of infinitive-splitting sits heavily should remember that to give conclusive evidence, by distortions, of misconceiving the nature of the s. i. is far more damaging to their literary pretensions than an actual lapse could be; for it exhibits them as deaf to the normal rhythm of English sentences. No sensitive ear can fail to be shocked, if the following examples are read aloud, by the strangeness of the indicated adverbs. Why on earth, the reader wonders, is that word out of its place? He will find, on looking through again, that each has been turned out of a similar position, viz. between the word be and a passive participle. Reflection will assure him that the cause of dislocation is always the same—all these writers have sacrificed the run of their sentences to the delusion that 'to be really understood' is a split infinitive. It is not; and the straitest non-splitter of us all can with a clear conscience restore each of the adverbs to its rightful place:

* He was proposed at the last moment as a candidate likely generally to be accepted.
* When the record of this campaign comes dispassionately to be written, and in just perspective, it will be found that...
* New principles will have boldly to be adopted if the Scottish case is to be met.
* This is a very serious matter, which clearly ought further to be inquired into.
* The Headmaster of a public school possesses very great powers, which ought most carefully and considerately to be exercised.
* The time to get this revaluation put through is when the amount paid by the State to the localities is very largely to be increased.

3. The above writers are bogy-haunted creatures who for fear of splitting an infinitive abstain from doing something quite different, i.e. dividing be from its complement by an adverb; see further under POSITION OF ADVERBS. Those who presumably do know what split infinitives are, and condemn them, are not so easily identified, since they include all who neither commit the sin nor flounder about in saving themselves from it—all who combine a reasonable dexterity with acceptance of conventional rules. But when the dexterity is lacking, disaster follows. It does not add to a writer's readableness if readers are pulled up now and again to wonder—Why this distortion? Ah, to be sure, a non-split die-hard! That is the mental dialogue occasioned by each of the adverbs in the examples below. It is of no avail merely to fling oneself desperately out of temptation; one must so do it that no traces of the struggle remain. Sentences must if necessary be thoroughly remodelled instead of having a word lifted from its original place and dumped elsewhere:

* What alternative can be found which the Pope has not condemned, and which will make it possible to organize legally public worship?
* It will, when better understood, tend firmly to establish relations between Capital and Labour.
* Both Germany and England have done ill in not combining to forbid flatly hostilities.
* Every effort must be made to increase adequately professional knowledge and attainments.
* We have had to shorten somewhat Lord D———'s letter.
* The kind of sincerity which enables an author to move powerfully the heart would...
* Safeguards should be provided to prevent effectually cosmopolitan financiers from manipulating those reserves.

4. Just as those who know and condemn the s. i. include many who are not recognizable, since only the clumsier performers give positive proof of resistance to temptation, so too those who know and approve are not distinguished with certainty. When a man splits an infinitive, he may be doing it unconsciously as a member of our class 1, or he may be deliberately rejecting the trammels of convention and announcing that he means to do as he will with his own infinitives. But, as the following examples are from newspapers of high repute, and high newspaper tradition is strong against splitting, it is perhaps fair to assume that each specimen is a manifesto of independence:

* It will be found impossible to considerably improve the present wages of the miners without jeopardizing the interests of capital.
* Always providing that the Imperialists do not feel strong enough to decisively assert their power in the revolted provinces...
* But even so, he seems to still be allowed to speak at Unionist demonstrations.
* It is the intention of the Minister of Transport to substantially increase all present rates by means of a general percentage.
* The men in many of the largest districts are declared to strongly favor a strike if the minimum wage is not conceded.

It should be noticed that in these the separating adverb could have been placed outside the infinitive with little or in most cases no damage to the sentence-rhythm (considerably after miners, decisively after power, still with clear gain after be, substantially after rates, and strongly at some loss after strike), so that protest seems a safe diagnosis.

5. The attitude of those who know and distinguish is something like this: We admit that separation of to from its infinitive is not in itself desirable, and we shall not gratuitously say either 'to mortally wound' or 'to mortally be wounded'; but we are not foolish enough to confuse the latter with 'to be mortally wounded', which is blameless English, nor 'to just have heard' with 'to have just heard', which is also blameless. We maintain, however, that a real s. i., though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, and 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 reminders of a tyrannous convention as 'in not combining to forbid flatly hostilities' are far more abnormal than the abnormality they evade. We will split infinitives sooner than be ambiguous or artificial; more than that, we will freely admit that sufficient recasting will get rid of any s. i. without involving either of those faults, and yet reserve to ourselves the right of deciding in each case whether recasting is worth while.

Let us take an example: 'In these circumstances, the Commission, judging from the evidence taken in London, has been feeling its way to modifications intended to better equip successful candidates for careers in India and at the same time to meet reasonable Indian demands.' To better equip? We refuse 'better to equip' as a shouted reminder of the tyranny; we refuse 'to equip better' as ambiguous (better as an adjective?); we regard 'to equip successful candidates better' as lacking compactness, as possibly tolerable for an anti-splitter, but not good enough for us. What then of recasting? 'intended to make successful candidates fitter for' is the best we can do if the exact sense is to be kept; it takes some thought to arrive at the correction; was the game worth the candle?

After this inconclusive discussion, in which, however, the author's opinion has perhaps been allowed to appear with indecent plainness, readers may like to settle the following question for themselves. 'The greatest difficulty about assessing the economic achievements of the Soviet Union is that its spokesmen try absurdly to exaggerate them; in consequence the visitor may tend badly to underrate them.' Has dread of the s. i. led the writer to attach his adverbs to the wrong verbs, and would he not have done better to boldly split both infinitives, since he cannot put the adverbs after them without spoiling his rhythm? or are we to give him the benefit of the doubt, and suppose that he really meant absurdly to qualify try and badly to qualify tend?

It is perhaps hardly fair that this article should have quoted no split infinitives except such as, being reasonably supposed (as in 4) to be deliberate, are likely to be favourable specimens. Let it therefore conclude with one borrowed from a reviewer, to whose description of it no exception need be taken: 'A book...of which the purpose is thus—with a deafening split infinitive—stated by its author: "Its main idea is to historically, even while events are maturing, and divinely—from the Divine point of view—impeach the European system of Church and States".'