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 ...

Reader Don in Los Angeles County wrote recently with a question about a well-known grammar issue called a “split infinitive.” “I learned about them 50 years ago and I am somewhat sensitive about them ...

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 ...

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 ...

Today we're gonna talk about split infinitives. First of all, what is an infinitive? It's a form of the verb that has to in front of it. And it doesn't indicate anything about tense or about person or ...

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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 ...

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 ...

Time travel always seemed to me a silly idea — at least as it’s portrayed in movies and on TV. Sure, it’s fun to ponder whether a guy can be his own grandpa. But time-travel movies always fall apart ...

THE first element of good style is clearness, and this may or may not be combined with literary elegance. It is usual to regard a split infinitive as a sign of indifference to pure English, yet this ...