10 ‘grammar rules’ it’s ok to break (sometimes) (III)

Recently, I came across an engaging essay Harvard University professor Steven Pinker with the above title, which is excerpted from his new book titled “The Sense of Style: the Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.” Enjoy. By Steven Pinker Split infinitivesMost mythical usage rules are merely harmless. The prohibition of split infinitives […]

Recently, I came across an engaging essay Harvard University professor Steven Pinker with the above title, which is excerpted from his new book titled “The Sense of Style: the Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.” Enjoy.

By Steven Pinker

Split infinitives
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. During the 2009 presidential inauguration, Chief Justice John Roberts, a famous stickler for grammar, could not bring himself to have Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States”. Abandoning his strict constructionism, Roberts unilaterally amended the Constitution and had Obama “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” The garbled oath raised fears about whether the transfer of power had been legitimate, and so they repeated the oath verbatim, split verb and all, in a private meeting later that afternoon.
The very terms “split infinitive” and “split verb” are based on a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split a verb because it consists of a single word, such as amare, “to love”. But in English, the so-called infinitive “to write” consists of two words, not one: the subordinator “to” and the plain form of the verb “write”, which can also appear without “to” in constructions such as “She helped him pack” and “You must be brave.” There is not the slightest reason to interdict an adverb from the position before the main verb, and great writers in English have placed it there for centuries. Indeed, the spot in front of the main verb is often the most natural resting place for an adverb, and sometimes it is the only resting place. Unsplitting the infinitive in the New Yorker cartoon caption “I’m moving to France to not get fat” (yielding “I’m moving to France not to get fat”) would garble the meaning, and doing so with “Profits are expected to more than double this year,” would result in gibberish: “Profits are expected more than to double this year.”
More generally, the preverbal position is the only one in which the adverb unambiguously modifies the verb. In a sentence in which the author may have taken pains to unsplit an infinitive, such as “The board voted immediately to approve the casino”, the reader has to wonder whether it was the vote that was immediate, or the approval. With the infinitive left unsplit – “The board voted to immediately approve the casino” – it can only be the approval. This does not mean that infinitives should always be split. Indeed, it’s a good habit to at least consider moving an adverb to the end of the verb phrase. If the adverb conveys important information, it belongs there; if it doesn’t (such as “really”, “just”, “actually” and other hedges), it might be a verbal fluffball that is best omitted altogether. And since there are benighted sticklers out there who will mistakenly accuse you of making an error when you split an infinitive, you might as well not ask for trouble if it makes no difference to the sentence anyway.
Finally, in many cases a quantifier naturally floats leftward away from the verb, unsplitting the infinitive:
“I find it hard to specify when to not split an infinitive.”
“I find it hard to specify when not to split an infinitive.”
The unsplit versions sound more elegant to me, though 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.
That and which
Many spurious rules start out as helpful hints intended to rescue indecisive writers from paralysis when faced with a choice provided by the richness of English. These guides for the perplexed also make the lives of copy editors easier, so they may get incorporated into style sheets. Before you know it, a rule of thumb morphs into a rule of grammar, and a perfectly innocuous (albeit second-choice) construction is demonised as incorrect. Nowhere is this transition better documented than with the phony but ubiquitous rule on when to use “which” and when to use “that”.
According to the traditional rule, the choice depends on which of two kinds of relative clause the word is introducing. A nonrestrictive relative clause is set off by commas, dashes or parentheses, as in “The pair of shoes, which cost five thousand dollars, was hideous.” A restrictive relative clause is essential to the meaning of the sentence, often because it pinpoints the referent of the noun from among a set of alternatives. If we were narrating a documentary about Imelda Marcos’s vast shoe collection and wanted to single out one of the pairs by how much she paid for it and then say something about that pair alone, we would write “The pair of shoes that cost £5,000 was hideous.” The choice between “that” and “which”, according to the rule, is simple: nonrestrictive relative clauses take “which”; restrictive relative clauses take “that”.
One part of the rule is correct: it’s odd to use “that” with a nonrestrictive relative clause, as in “The pair of shoes, that cost £5,000, was hideous.” So odd, in fact, that few people write that way, rule or no rule.
The other part of the rule is utterly incorrect. There is nothing wrong with using “which” to introduce a restrictive relative clause, as in “The pair of shoes which cost £5,000 was hideous.” Indeed, with some restrictive relatives, “which” is the only option, such as “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “The book in which I scribbled my notes is worthless.” Even when “which” isn’t mandatory, great writers have been using it for centuries, as in the King James Bible’s “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” and Franklin Roosevelt’s “a day which will live in infamy”.
So what’s a writer to do? The real decision is not whether to use “that” or “which” but whether to use a restrictive or a nonrestrictive relative clause. If a phrase that expresses a comment about a noun can be omitted without substantially changing the meaning, and if it would be pronounced after a slight pause and with its own intonation contour, then be sure to set it off with commas (or dashes or parentheses): “The Cambridge restaurant, which had failed to clean its grease trap, was infested with roaches.” Having done so, you don’t have to worry about whether to use “that” or “which”, because if you’re tempted to use “that” it means either that you are more than 200 years old or that your ear for the English language is so mistuned that the choice of “that” and “which” is the least of your worries.
If, on the other hand, a phrase provides information about a noun that is crucial to the point of the sentence (as in “Every Cambridge restaurant which failed to clean its grease trap was infested with roaches”, where omitting the italicised phrase would radically alter the meaning), and if it is pronounced within the same intonation contour as the noun, then don’t set it off with punctuation. As for the choice you now face between “which” and “that”: if you hate making decisions, you won’t go wrong if you use “that”.