Purism, the Economist and split infinitives

On the Language Log Geoff Pullum inveighs against

the fact that writers in The Economist are required to write unnatural or even ungrammatical sentences rather than risk the wrath of the semi-educated public by "splitting an infinitive" (putting a preverbal modifier immediately before the verb in a to-infinitival complement clause). The magazine published a sentence containing the phrase publicly to label itself a foreign agent where clarity demanded to publicly label itself a foreign agent.

He quotes the Economist’s own style guide

Happy the man who has never been told that it is wrong to split an infinitive: the ban is pointless. Unfortunately, to see it broken is so annoying to so many people that you should observe it.

and describes it as

A pointless ban on a natural syntactic possibility that has never been authoritatively declared to have anything wrong with it in grammatical terms, but you should observe the ban anyway. Is this a sensible way for a great magazine (my favorite magazine) to make its decisions about how its writers should phrase things in their native language?

Obviously, the Economist disagrees and thinks that it is sensible. Of course, nobody who has studied the English language professionally (including explicitly the author of the Economist’s style guide) can see anything wrong with split infinitives. But equally, nobody who has studied popular opinion on the language can deny that split infinitives raise hackles across a wide swathe of public opinion. What we see here is the classic difference of viewpoint between an academic working with theory and a practical newspaper that needs to sell copies without offending its readers. Teachers have the same dilemma; in my Guide to English Language Usage I write:

… it must be said that there is still, rightly or wrongly, a considerable feeling among English speakers that a split infinitive is wrong. Sometimes it seems natural to do so but a decision to split an infinitive deliberately should never be taken lightly.

The reviewer in Modern English Teacher described this as “a sensible conclusion.”

My job is to teach and advise people who need to use English for their business and professional purposes. I also translate texts, sometimes for publication, for people who are demanding in their requirements. I simply cannot afford to have a student come back to me with a complaint that something that I have taught or tolerated has been criticised in no uncertain manner as a grammatical solecism by a native speaker; nor can I afford to have an argument with a translation client on the same matter. As a result, I play it safe just as the Economist does.

And I would have expected an arch-descriptivist like Geoff Pullum to have noticed, recorded and accepted that very many people choose to use the language in just that way rather than laying down the law and, ahem, prescribing how the language should be used by those who teach and write to satisfy the public taste.

I have a post on split infinitives here.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons)

Note (17 June 2013): Geoff Pullum has mentioned this post here. He says:

What [Harvey] shouldn't do is tell students or clients that "split infinitives" should be avoided for reasons having to do with respecting English grammar, because that's simply false.

Pullum will no doubt be pleased to have my categorical assurance that I don’t do that; my position is after all only implicit in my above comment:

nobody who has studied the English language professionally … can see anything wrong with split infinitives.

Comments

[John Cowan]

I simply cannot afford to have a student come back to me with a complaint that something that I have taught or tolerated has been criticised in no uncertain manner as a grammatical solecism by a native speaker.

Then you are lost. In the age of the Internet, where the English that people read can come from anywhere in the world, there will always be people who will land on either a Briticism or an Americanism (or an Australianism or an Indianism) with all ten toes. Nor is it possible to always and everywhere avoid usages that are unacceptable to a large fraction of the anglophone population.

Indeed, since there are only tens of millions of Britons to complain and hundreds of millions of Americans, the safest thing to do would be to teach all your students American spellings, American grammar, and American idiom exclusively, as by learning to write "criticized" instead of "criticised". :-) At least their work would present a smaller attack surface.

[Peter Harvey]

In Europe British English is the standard, as used by the EU, the Council of Europe and European multinational companies. Of course, there are people here who use American spelling and pronunciation; provided this is done consistently there is usually no problem for people who are not constrained by a predetermined style and in such cases I make no attempt to impose a British standard. The same goes for the Cambridge EFL exams; consistent use of American or other forms of English is not penalised. One of the Cambridge oral examiners here is American.

The -ise/-ize difference is not a simple GB/US division. While -ize is standard in American English both forms are used in Britain. In fact -ize is the preferred form of Oxford University press and thus of the OED. I have chosen -ise as my personal style but accept -ize without comment.

[Richard Hershberger]

The problem is much greater than conflicting regional standards. There is an endless bounty of damn fool superstitions about grammar. The split infinitive is merely one of the best known. Add to it the damn fool superstition about ending a sentence with a preposition. Then begin working your way down the list of other damn fool superstitions. Where to stop? At what point do you decide that this damn fool superstition is widespread enough to require close attention, while that damn fool superstition is obscure enough to safely ignore? (Oops!: Make that "to ignore safely".)

My personal rule of thumb is that if I am writing for a person in authority with known adherence to some damn fool superstition or another, then I will worry about it for the sake of avoiding notice. Persons in authority, after all, need to be handled carefully, like venomous snakes. Otherwise, I don't worry about the damn fool superstitions. If I am writing for publication this has the added benefit of giving the copy editor something to do.