DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language ...

Now that you have freed prepositions to bravely be sentence endings, you might clarify Miss Thistlebottom’s split infinitive rule. — Pam Rider, East Village, San Diego Joining the preposition rule in ...

Today we're gonna talk about split infinitives. First of all, what is an infinitive? It's a form of the verb that has to in front of it. And it doesn't indicate anything about tense or about person or ...

Not long ago while editing a series of articles, I noticed that the writer had strange ideas about where to put adverbs. Many were placed before the verbs and some before the subjects too. “He ...

Time travel always seemed to me a silly idea — at least as it’s portrayed in movies and on TV. Sure, it’s fun to ponder whether a guy can be his own grandpa. But time-travel movies always fall apart ...

A reader asked me whether splitting infinitives is grammatically correct. Most modern authorities say it is, but I recommend that you don’t spilt infinitives because it may irritate judges who were ...

NOT before time, the proliferation of the split infinitive in spoken English and its almost tripling since the early 1990s is announced by researchers. ("To actually split an infinitive on the ...

I didn't know what a split infinitive was until my editor pointed it out to me deep into the last century when I was still wearing skinny ties and covering the Streamwood village board. Dolores ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

THE first element of good style is clearness, and this may or may not be combined with literary elegance. It is usual to regard a split infinitive as a sign of indifference to pure English, yet this ...