As an example splitting infinitives is more accepted today, why are we happy to negate basic rules?
No idea. I was educated at a strict grammar school in the 1960s and we had to learn every part of speech, how to parse a sentence, how to recognise the main clause, the subjunctive, the punctuation, the spelling, everything, and certainly the split infinitive. My own children were not taught these things in the 1970s and 1980s, so I taught them at home. Teaching changed in the 70s and English became more spontaneous and expressive – I remember having to write to my son’s teacher to tell him that my son had spelt ’embarrassed’correctly after he (the teacher) had crossed it out and replaced it with a wrong spelling. He took it very well. People think that ‘correct’ spelling doesn’t matter anymore but it does. I see CVs with awful errors, letters with bad spelling, and I mark first year undergraduates’ essays, and they are full of mistakes. The grammar, the syntax, the spelling, the punctuation – dire. Employers complain a lot nowadays about the poor standard of English, and I’m not surpr
You aren’t going to like my answer, I know. It was never against any rule to split an infinitive in English. It is impossible to split infinitives in Latin, or, for example Spanish. Infinitives in these languages don’t consist of two words as they do in English; the infinitive is one word. Eighteenth century English grammarians are famous for erroneously applying the rules of Latin to English. The notions of “grammar” they’ve handed down are still haunting us. At one time, Latin was the language of the educated, and instead of studying English linguistics, those folks tried to standardize an incorrect set of rules for English. Some linguists have written that they believe people who do not truly understand grammar like to memorize two or three “rules” and continue to apply them, incorrect or not. It’s rather unflattering, but it represents an attempt on grammarians’ and linguists’ part to explain why those beliefs are so slow to die off. There are several other things that people on Y!
