An Anti-American Post of Questionnable Virtue.

I was reading an old blog post tonight and came across a line of text which disturbed me. In fact it made me feel almost queasy, so I read it again to discover the reason.

I found the problem immediately. I’d only gone and split an infinitive... Call myself a writer? (Well, not exactly, but everybody needs some sort of a peg to hang themselves on.) But there it was, as plain as the tails on the serif fonts.

Americans do that a lot, you know. ‘I decided to not go,’ they say without so much as a hint of shame or remorse. It makes me froth at the mouth and want to scream at them (which wouldn’t be very nice if I was frothing at the mouth.)

‘You did not decide to not go,’ I want to rail, ‘you decided not to go. Get it? Go is a verb. To go is the infinitive form of said verb, and infinitives are as conjoined twins – inseparable. I’m the first to admit that there are no absolute rules in the English language because it isn’t classical Latin, but there are certain principles so deeply ingrained that they function as rules, and to break them so wantonly amounts to criminal behaviour. It makes you appear ignorant of acceptable practice in the matter of linguistic propriety. Don’t do it. It’s bad. More than that even, it makes the guardians of the Mother Tongue – that’s us – much given to apoplexy and frothing at the mouth, which is highly unbecoming and therefore unacceptable. Are you with me? (Bloody colonials!)

Can you imagine how I felt when I discovered that I’d published a post containing a split infinitive? ‘Shabby’ would be an understatement. I chose to assume that the fault lay with all the comments from colonials I read on YouTube after midnight. Bad habits have a way of slithering between the cracks when it’s 2am and you’re crossing no man’s land between being fully sober and acceptably drunk.