First you learn to crawl, then you learn to walk, then you learn to run (then you learn to drive five miles to the place where you like to walk or run). The same process applies to learning about ...

Now that you have freed prepositions to bravely be sentence endings, you might clarify Miss Thistlebottom’s split infinitive rule. — Pam Rider, East Village, San Diego Joining the preposition rule in ...

DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language ...

A reader asked me whether splitting infinitives is grammatically correct. Most modern authorities say it is, but I recommend that you don’t spilt infinitives because it may irritate judges who were ...

Sitting here looking at an infinitive that I absolutely must split.But Econ style book, even though we know the rule is bogus, won't let me I went on to quote our style book entry on split infinitives ...

A recent comment thread brought up the old debate about split infinitives. I’m for them, in the sense that I think there is nothing inherently ungrammatical or even clumsy about them. Sometimes they ...

Geoffrey Pullum (Language Log) has long railed against the no-split-infinitives demand; his latest focuses on this passage from the militantly anti-split-infinitive Economist: At a computer-security ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...