Gamer girl here, I'm Minion Fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today,

we're going to talk about split infinitives and missing words in slang.

When adults are ambushed with the concept of grammar, for example, when they meet someone

who goes by the name Grammar Girl, they often reach into the depths of their grade school

memories and come up with something along the lines of, don't split infinitives, right?

Indeed, splitting infinitives is a grammar topic, but the rule you may have learned

against splitting infinitives isn't as hard and fast as you might imagine.

Those are the two word forms of verbs such as to read, to write, and to illustrate.

If you want to remember what a split infinitive is, just remember what might be the most

famous example. Star Trek's two boldly go where no one has gone before. Two boldly go

is a split infinitive. Boldly splits to go. When you split an infinitive, you put something

usually an adverb between the two parts, to diligently read, to happily write, to scientifically

illustrate. The idea that you shouldn't put an adverb in the middle of an infinitive

was mentioned earlier but was most prominently introduced by Henry Alfred, the Dean of Canterbury,

and his 1864 book The Queen's English. Alfred didn't state it as a rule though, instead

in response to a correspondent who liked phrases such as to scientifically illustrate, he

said he saw, quote, no good reason, unquote, to split the infinitive. One reason Alfred

gave for his belief was that nobody was doing it. He wrote, quote, this practice is entirely

unknown in English speakers and writers, unquote. But the Oxford English Dictionary disagrees,

reporting that split infinitives were widespread at the time. In fact, many respected writers,

both before and after Alfred's time, have employed split infinitives, including Thomas

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