To boldly go for it: why the split infinitive is no longer a mistake

It was the Victorians who decided that splitting an infinitive was a grammatical error. Now, researchers says, there is good reason to consign the rule to history

Star Trek’s ‘to boldly go’ is the most famous example of the split infinitive.
Highly logical, captain: Star Trek’s ‘to boldly go’ is the most famous example of the split infinitive. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Name: The split infinitive.

Age: 800 years. Ish.

Appearance: Hideous or invisible, depending on your point of view.

I’d have to say invisible, since I don’t know what it is. An infinitive is one of the many forms that a verb can take. If I say, “It is nice to know more than you” then “to know” is the infinitive of the verb know.

What’s a split infinitive then? A split infinitive is when other words creep into the middle of an English infinitive. The most famous example is Star Trek’s “to boldly go where no one has gone before”. The Victorians decided that splitting an infinitive was a grammatical mistake, and some people still agree with them.

Why? That’s a question I can’t answer. Basically, they just think it’s clumsy to wantonly put in extra words after the “to”.

I see what they mean. But now they have been proven wrong!

Really? How? Researchers at Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press have concluded that split infinitives are now nearly three times as common in British speech as they were in the early 1990s.

How on earth can they tell? They’ve gathered the Spoken British National Corpus, which they say is the largest ever public collection of transcribed British conversations.

How have they done that? They persuaded 672 people to record 1,000 hours of conversations using their smartphones. This produced 11.5m words, with a rate of 117 split infinitives per million, compared with a rate of 44 per million recorded in the early 1990s.

OK. But surely split infinitives don’t stop being mistakes just because more people use them? Au contraire. In language, that’s exactly what happens, because the meaning of words keeps changing.

Eh? Maybe 100 years ago splitting an infinitive meant, “I don’t know my grammar rules”, because they were usually avoided by people who did. However, now that most people, including language experts, are relaxed about split infinitives, that changes. Indeed, taking trouble carefully to avoid them means: “I’m a bit fussy and old-fashioned.”

And correcting other people’s means: “I prefer being right to being kind.” Exactly.

Do say: “I’ve become increasingly disinterested in this subject.”

Don’t say: “No you haven’t! You’ve become uninterested.”