Greetings, Earthlings!
It’s time for another earthly grammar joke… which makes me wonder… are they funnier on other planets? So you’ve likely picked up on the other-worldly theme going on here. There is a reason (other than the fact that I am sometimes a weirdo). Today’s grammar joke picks up the thread from the other week when we watched Gerry the gerund and Franklin the infinitive stroll into the bar. In case you missed it or are fuzzy on the details, we determined that Gerry is a lot like Norm from the old TV show Cheers, while Franklin is essentially Lilith (Frasier’s wife). If you can bring Lilith back to mind, just hang out there a moment. I’d say she’s got some other-worldly qualities, wouldn’t you? She’s undoubtedly brilliant, but has the emotional range of a teaspoon (thank you Hermione Granger, care of JK Rowling). She functions more like an android than a full-fledged human. Even Data from Star Trek (who is an android) has more human-like qualities than she does (although I’d argue her makeup is better and she’s naturally ageless). OK, now that I’ve ripped poor Lilith to shreds, I’ll try to walk it back a bit and say she’s a product of her genetics and upbringing (and maybe circuitry) and so it’s not fair to judge this harshly. But Data did have an evil twin named Lore… perhaps there were three androids? As far as I know their creator, Dr. Noonien Soong, is human as has passed away so we may never be able to know.
If you’re wondering how such a cool chick (ehem, me) has become so incredibly nerdy, you can blame my husband. And I’m guessing there was a good amount of latent nerdidity (how’s that for a new noun?!) within me to begin with. But you see, growing up, my dad pretty much had that role nailed down in the family. First, he’s an eagle scout and a history buff, and second he was the one with Star Trek perpetually on our analog (sans cable) TV. And the poor guy didn’t really have a chance with two vaguely athletic daughters to pass his nerdidity. We were out playing, and later busy rolling our eyes (at pretty much everything) at the Klingon language spewing harshly from the boob tube and at the seemingly grotesque and disfigured alien life forms beaming on starships and back to their home planets. And let’s face it, I didn’t know Romulan from Klingon from Betazoid from Bajoran. All I could gather was that Spock had pointy ears and essentially no emotions, which made him a Vulcan And those outfits? Wow. They were worse than marching band uniforms. No, wait, that’s actually not possible. I’d still rather sport a star fleet uniform in all its polyester glory than old, smelly marching band attire. The bottom line is that I, following in my sister’s footsteps, was way to cool for Star Trek and would rather have watched Seinfeld, Mad About You, Party of Five, Friends, 90210, etc. (Because duh, I was a girl/tween in the 90s.) But alas, we only had one TV that lived in the living room.
If you’re now wondering if we’ll ever get to a punch line of any kind with this joke, the answer is… I’m working on it; hang in there. We learned the other week that the infinitive form of a verb is actually just a plain ol’ un-conjugated version of the verb in its “to” form. To run, to walk, to sleep, perchance to dream. All infinitives. And we do actually use them in normal conversation. I like to eat. (And if you remember the gerund, it can show up like this: I like eating.) To eat is Franklin the infinitive. Now say “I like to eat” all monotone like a robot and you’ve got yourself Lilith. Kidding. Someone needs to be the butt of this joke, because alone, it’s just not that funny.
If you’ve been on the planet long enough, you’ve probably heard the term “split infinitive.” And if it was a particularly strict teacher or a professor who schooled you on it, it definitely had some negative juju associated with it. And that’s fine, they were and are correct; we shouldn’t “split” our infinitives as a general rule.
What does that mean? What does that look like? Make a fist with each hand and put them in front of you so they’re touching. The left fist is “to” and the right fist is the verb. Let’s take the infinitive “to go.” Do you have your fists in place? OK, good. Now… let’s say some other word saunters up and wants in on this cozy action. It’s looking to start a brawl and it means business. In fact, it wants to get all up in to go’s business… like right smack in the middle of to and go. Yup, we’ve got ourselves a splitter. Splitters are most commonly adverbs. Bunch of punks. This splitter’s name is boldly. And like its meaning, it jumps right into the fray between to and go giving us the well-known phrase from Star Trek, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” How rude… but it sounds kind of awesome, right?
If you’ve read of a few of these posts before you can probably guess where I’m going. You can’t get too crazy about the rules because if you wind up making things incredibly awkward just to adhere to a grammar rule, you’re missing the whole point.
Let’s look at two examples:
“We should try to whenever possible avoid splitting infinitives.” There’s a definite split between to and avoid. We can understand the sentence OK, but it’s not really right. It’d be better to say, “We should try to avoid splitting infinitives whenever possible.” Make sense?
“He agreed to quickly and quietly leave the house through the window when her mom comes home.” Scandalous, right? But more than that, we’ve got a split infinitive that’s completely avoidable with some super simple re-work. Put those “fists” back together. What do you get? “He agreed to leave the house through the window quickly and quietly when her mom comes home.”
But… there are times when we try to keep that infinitive together and we wind up sounding like a ding-dong.
“He used to secretly admire her all throughout high school.” Somehow, when you try to fix this, you get “He used to admire her secretly…” and it loses all its pizazz and mystique. In fact, it sounds kind of creepy now.
Here’s a more complex example: “Even in the twenty-first century, human beings are unable to fully comprehend the vastness and complexity of the universe.” Here we’ve got “fully” splitting to comprehend. It sounds pretty good, but it does technically break “the rule” so let’s see what happens when we move “fully” around.
“Even in the twenty-first century, human beings are unable fully to comprehend the vastness and complexity of the universe. [This construction is just plain awkward.]
Even in the twenty-first century, human beings are unable to comprehend the vastness and complexity of the universe fully. [Here the modifier fully is very far removed from the word it modifies, comprehend.][1]
That leaves us as rule-breakers, so we might as well be proud of it because rules are made to be broken. (Just not in an overly flagrantly manner.)
And so my friends, I’ll leave you with our bold split here: “A split infinitive walks into a bar… to boldly go where no infinitive has gone before.”
If we run the split infinitive test on the first part of this sentence, we’d get “Boldly to go where no man has gone before” or “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” Benjamin Dreyer has the best commentary about this, check it out. He says, “If either of those sounds better to you, be my guest. To me they sound as if they were translated from the Vulcan.”[2]
Yeah, don’t mess with Star Trek. Live long and prosper, nerds.
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Sources
[1] https://getitwriteonline.com/articles/split-infinitives/
[2] Dreyer, Benjamin. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. Random House: New York, 2019. Pgs 10-11.