Split Infinitives Again
Some wisdom from Steve Pinker on split infinitives and the word “mansplaining”
The Fix
The Sentence
Here is a sentence from a glossy on tulip wind turbines:
The Wind Tulip is designed to peacefully and quietly produce clean energy at low starting speeds from any direction. [bolding is ours]
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The construction in bold is a split infinitive. The infinitive of the verb “produce” is “to produce” and in this sentence the writer is splitting the infinitive with “peacefully and quietly.” It used to be that split infinitives were judged a grammar faux pas. That’s no longer true. Here is Steve Pinker on the construction:
“Most mythical usage rules are merely harmless. The prohibition of split infinitives (as in "Are you sure you want to permanently delete all the items and subfolders in the 'Deleted Items' folder?") and the even more sweeping prohibition of "split verbs" (as in "I will always love you" and "I would never have guessed") is downright pernicious.” (See his article in The Guardian).
Here is the novelist Raymond Chandler writing the editor of The Atlantic with advice to a proof-reader:
“By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, … this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.” (Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane, The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909–1959 (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2000), 77)
Pinker acknowledges the existence of reactionaries:
“… I can’t be sure that my ears haven’t been contaminated by a habit of cravenly unsplitting infinitives to avoid spitballs from the Gotcha! Gang.” (from the article cited above)
At Sentence Logic, we share this tendency and try not to split infinitives. For example, the sentence above could have been written
The Wind Tulip is designed to produce clean energy peacefully and quietly at low starting speeds from any direction.
There is no change in meaning and, most importantly, no opportunity for the Gotcha! Gang to weigh in.
Odds and Ends
Fixing a Napoleon Hill Quote
Napoleon Hill wrote the best-seller “Think and Grow Rich” and is often quoted by those who write about leadership. Here is one of his quotes:
The world does not pay men for that which they “know.” It pays them for what they DO, or induce others to do. [the bolding is ours]
It seems to us the bolded words could be replaced with “what” to arrive at this revision,
The world does not pay men for what they “know.” It pays them for what they DO, or induce others to do.
We’re also not sure why the word know was placed in quotes. But we’ll assume that Hill had a good reason for doing so.
Finally, we see this quote as fool’s gold. It’s so obviously true that, to us, it’s not worth a sentence. But it sure sounds insightful.
Word of the Day
It’s mansplaining.
We see this word a lot. The Google Dictionary defines it “the explanation of something by a man, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronizing.”
The idea behind the word comes from author Rebecca Solnit’s 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me that first appeared on the website TomDispatch.com. Her 2008 book of the same title starts this way:
I still don’t know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion’s young ladies. The house was great–if you like Ralph Lauren-style chalets–a rugged luxury cabin at 9,000 feet complete with elk antlers, lots of kilims, and a wood-burning stove. We were preparing to leave, when our host said, “No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you.” He was an imposing man who’d made a lot of money.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his authentically grainy wood table and said to me, “So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.”
I replied, “Several, actually.”
He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, my book on the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book–with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
Solnit then explains that it’s clear the man is talking about her book and that it takes four interjections by her friend before he finally takes that fact on board.
By gawd, that’s mansplaining.
Wikipedia claims that the word first appeared in a comment on the social network LiveJournal.