Baldly go?
Not only a split infinitive, but the pun reflects baldly on the Reg staff. Hang your heads in shame!
Three 'nauts are on their way to the International Space Station – and two of them are going to remain onboard the orbiting lab for a full year The pair will tough out the marathon stretch so NASA can understand more about the long-term effects of life in space on the human body. Youtube Video On Friday, the astronauts …
More than occasional, the cases where it really should be avoided are those that jar because of style and those where the meaning varies with post- or pre-verb placement (normally, etc.).
Otherwise, the 'rule' is a crock.
People with education 'split infinitives' in speech all of the time.
The entire concept of the split infinitive is derived from languages in which tenses are conjugated with suffixes and prefixes and the infinitive form is a single word. By contrast, the English infinitive includes the particle "to", a separate word.
The concept of a split infinitive is nonsense in most languages - you can't split a single word. The application of the split infinitive prohibition to English originally rested on the belief that because Latin - seen as the ideal language at the time the rule was invented - did not split infinitives, therefore no language should do so.
The problem arises, however: English is not Latin. Its grammatical rules are very different. The split infinitive does not apply and has not applied for perhaps a thousand years. To boldly go is grammatically as valid as to go boldly. Avoidance of the so-called split infinitive leads to clunky and occasionally confusing language structures, similarly to the prohibition of ending a sentence with preposition - it is unnatural to our language and needlessly pedantic. To so loftily and haughtily proscribe a linguistic form, merely because a latinist a couple of centuries ago decided such a form was inferior to the pure language of his study, is something we should no longer be required to put up with.
You have cut-and-pasted part of your post, neither using quotation marks nor giving attribution. Shame on you.
I agree with the sentiment, though.
The reason the split-infinitive is such a fave error for spotting by the semi-literate is that even an idiot is able to spot it (a high rate of false positives from the idiots, prepositional 'to' frequently being identified as the start of a 'split infinitive').
In 'murica, it seems that many teachers tell their students to always (see what I did there?) place the adverb after the verb, even where it should naturally precede it.
That idiocy is all about avoiding the split infinitive. Unbelievable.
Then again, 'murican teachers also seen to advise their charges to avoid 'with' at all costs, except in such inane new formulations as 'I met with him at noon'.
Many more.
In 'murica, it seems that many teachers tell their students to always (see what I did there?) place the adverb after the verb, even where it should naturally precede it.
Evidence? I've never seen this practice, nor heard anyone advocate it. And I have degrees in English, and a mother who was an English teacher, and I've been a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, &c.
You are truly a 'murican and you have seen no sign of those things?
Always postfixing adverbs is not part of American english as a very interesting set of dialects, I love the speech of the mid-west, the south.wbut, as I said, advice from moronic teachers, very recent. Barbaric as it is, the motive is fear of splitting the infitive.