Common Grammar Mistakes Part Four: Grammar Myths

English is a language plagued with arbitrary rules and exceptions to rules. As if spelling and grammar weren't hard enough to learn, there are disagreements about certain rules that have stayed with us from the time of antiquity and no one knows why, but they do nothing but cause problems-and arguments.

Never Split Your Infinitives? Forget About It.

Many of us were taught that the infinitive of a verb starts with "to," such as to dance, to sing, or to cry. However, the infinitive is really just the purest form of the verb, such as dance, sing and cry. Therefore, splitting the infinitive is really a misnomer-there's nothing to split. This wasn't even an issue until Henry Alford, a Latin scholar, declared it a crime in his book A Plea for the Queen's English. However, English is not a Latin language, it's Germanic. While we have a few words that come from Latin roots, our grammar is not bound by Latin rules. In Latin, you cannot split infinitives, so Alford (and others like him) mistakenly thought that the rule should apply to English as well. Leading grammarians corrected this mistake about fifty years or so later, but the rule stuck.

Since that time, English students have been pulling their hair out trying to keep their infinitives together. In actuality, it is often ridiculous to impossible to keep the "to" with the verb. For example, when adding an adverb, it often sounds best to have it directly in front of the verb: Steve was able to quickly identify the stolen suitcase. It sounds funny to say that Steve was able to identify quickly the stolen suitcase, and changing the placement of the adverb can sometimes change the whole meaning of the sentence.

Never End Your Sentence With a Preposition? Never Say Never.

This is another rule that seems to have come from Latin. An 18th-century English clergyman named Robert Lowth wrote that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition in his grammar rule book, and it somehow became a hard-and-fast rule.

This has resulted in an abundance of awkwardly constructed sentences, and one famous instance led to Winston Churchill's famous quote "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put." (Note: this quote varies slightly depending on who's telling the story, and no one knows exactly what he said. This is my favorite version.)

In truth, there is no actual rule saying that you can't end a sentence with a preposition. However, stylistically it's not always the best choice, as it's stronger to end a sentence with a noun or verb. There are cases where it is unavoidable and therefore completely acceptable: such as "Who is this cake for?" You could say "For whom is this cake," but, to be frank, this is a stuffy and pretentious way to speak or write.