Verbs
Grammar and infinitives The author of this text is Kel Richards (Found in my Mail Box today). OZWORD OF THE DAY: "Split infinitive" In The Weekend Australian I read a review of a book about AI and its disastrous impact on undergraduate student essay writing. The review largely approved of the book, but towards the end the reviewer wrote this: ‘A quibble: throughout the book, he splits more infinitives than Abraham Lincoln split logs. Is a writer of books on writing permitted such literary slovenliness?’ My problem with this assertion is that I don’t think splitting the infinitive is literary slovenliness. I don’t even think it’s wrong! Yes, I know a lot of grammar books over the years have fulminated about this and told us never to split the infinitive. But they were wrong. I shall explain. I suppose I should start by explaining what ‘splitting the infinitive’ means. The infinitive form of any verb is the form that has the preposition ‘to’ in front of it. So, the infinitive form of the walking verb is ‘to walk.’ And every other verb has a similar construction. We talk about the verb ‘to walk’ and then all the tenses it can take—present (‘I walk’) present continuous (‘I am walking’) future (‘I will walk’) past (‘I walked) and so on. But the basic form of the verb, which we call the infinitive form, is ‘to…