Fire and Knowledge

I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive.

1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.
2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affection of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990), p. 144

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. People say things sometimes because they are easier or more sensible, but sometimes simply because that’s the way everyone else is saying them.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990), p. 98

Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

–Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (1990), p. 11

Every now and then a word comes to mean its opposite meaning. It is called catachresis (from the Greek ‘misuse’). Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, says this about it:

Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice–as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer’s day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite…. Simon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul’s Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice….

A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and — by 1769 — pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now impossible to tell in what sense it was intended… (pp. 77-78)

[A play] must be novel without being bizarre, often sublime and always natural; know the human heart and make it speak; be a great poet without ever letting any character in the piece appear to be a poet; know one’s language perfectly, speak it with purity, with a continuous harmony, without ever making a rhyme at the expense of sense.

–Voltaire, Candide (1758), translated by Dr. Ralph, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 34, p. 230

The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 141

The word is not just an idea. It is a small universe of ideas.

–Neil Postman, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (1979), p. 75

[T]he adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 83