Nicole points to a grammar quiz, while Pashmina is conducting a love affair (one, two) with the Economist Style Guide, which also has its own quiz.

I scored middlingly on both quizzes and, much like Pashmina, I think I’m a better person for it. You see, while I’m proud to take a relaxed, non-prescriptive approach to language, I am absolutely dogmatic that this is the only approach open to anyone who wants to call themselves a functional member of society.

So let’s sort some things out.

First, grammar quizzers: I admit it’s true I need to distinguish laid, lain and layed, but I really, really, really, don’t think I should know a factitive verb from a catenative verb in order to pass a grammar quiz.

Second, Mister Economist Style Guide: Context and intention cannot be ignored. Against one of my wrong multiple choice answers you say:

The last issue of The Economist implies our extinction; prefer last week’s or the latest issue.

All very well, but you didn’t give last week’s as an option, and for all I know the sentence in question was appearing in a copy of the Economist, in which case the latest issue refers to that very one, not the previous one. (And by the way, in Q8 two of your three options are identical.)

While we’re at it, I notice that the Guardian’s readers’ editor talks today about split infinitives, saying that

splitting an infinitive is no longer regarded as a particularly serious offence, as it was when schoolchildren were routinely thrashed for getting it wrong (just joking).

While Ian Mayes quotes several renowned resources, he omits (again) my favourite: Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English by Larry Trask. Trask’s opinion on this seems far preferable to, and far better grounded than, any I’ve come across elsewhere:

In all of English grammar, there is perhaps no other topic which inflames passions so strongly for so little reason as the construction wrongly called the split infinitive. This construction is illustrated by the examples She decided to never touch another cigarette and She decided to gradually get rid of her teddy bears, in which the sequences to never touch and to gradually get rid of are the “split infinitives”.

First of all, this traditional term is a misnomer, since, in this construction, nothing is split, least of all the infinitive, which is a single word: touch and get in my examples. A sequence like to touch or to get is not a single verb-form, nor indeed a grammatical unit of any kind, and it should not be treated as a unit. As can easily be shown, the sequence to touch another cigarette (for example) consists of an introductory particle to followed by a single grammatical unit, the verb phrase touch another cigarette. Accordingly, there is a break in structure between to and the following verb, and this break is often the most natural position to place an adverb.

See that? An infinitive in English is a single word. Splitting an infinitive is a misnomer, hence his use of scare quotes round the phrase “split infinitive”. You silly billies, you can’t split a single word. Abso-bloody-lutely.

Tags: language, grammar, quizzes, splitinfinitives