To Boldly Split Your Infinitives

One of the most famous quotes from one of the most famous television shows happens to annoy anyone who knows anything about grammar.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” is famous for being the slogan of the show Star Trek but it is equally famous for being grammatically incorrect.

Now you might be wondering, why is this wrong? It may sound so familiar that you cannot hear the error in the sentence but the sentence is incorrect. The best way to see this problem is to first understand what an infinitive is.

An infinitive is the combination of  ‘to’ + ‘verb’. To split an infinitive would be to place a word in between of these words.

Examples:

Infinitive- to sit, to twirl, to go, to be, to sing, to play

Split infinitives- to sadly sit, to excitedly twirl, to boldly go, to poorly sing, to quickly play

In all of the above listed examples the adverb has been shoved between the infinitive forms of the verb. The verb has been broken up. These types of errors have very simple and obvious solutions.  Instead of trying to break up this poor, loving infinitive, just leave it alone and use the adverb before, after or somewhere else in the sentence and the infinitive will stay together and be happy.

Examples:

1)    Juan hopes to quickly finish his blog so he can go play hockey

2)    Juan hopes to finish his blog quickly so he can go play hockey

The sentences above both have the same meaning yet one is grammatically correct and one is not. By simply moving the ‘quickly’ outside of the infinitive (to finish) it creates a great sentence which is also grammatically correct. I only wish the guys at Star Trek had read my blog before they coined their poorly constructed slogan. Those guys were crazy to boldly split that infinitive.