Most of What You Think You Know About Grammar is Wrong
And ending sentences with a preposition is nothing worth worrying about
- By Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellarman
- Illustration by Traci Daberko
- Smithsonian magazine, February 2013, Subscribe
You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”
It’s a great story, but it’s a myth. And so is that so-called grammar rule about ending sentences with prepositions. If that previous sentence bugs you, by the way, you’ve bought into another myth. No, there’s nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a conjunction, either. But perhaps the biggest grammar myth of all is the infamous taboo against splitting an infinitive, as in “to boldly go.” The truth is that you can’t split an infinitive: Since “to” isn’t part of the infinitive, there’s nothing to split. Great writers—including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne and Wordsworth—have been inserting adverbs between “to” and infinitives since the 1200s.
Where did these phony rules originate, and why do they persist?
For some of them, we can blame misguided Latinists who tried to impose the rules of their favorite language on English. Anglican bishop Robert Lowth popularized the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition in his 1762 book, A Short Introduction to English Grammar; while Henry Alford, a dean of Canterbury Cathedral, was principally responsible for the infinitive taboo, with his publication of A Plea for the Queen’s English in 1864.
In Latin, sentences don’t end in prepositions, and an infinitive is one word that can’t be divided. But in a Germanic language like English, as linguists have pointed out, it’s perfectly normal to end a sentence with a preposition and has been since Anglo-Saxon times. And in English, an infinitive is also one word. The “to” is merely a prepositional marker. That’s why it’s so natural to let English adverbs fall where they may, sometimes between “to” and a verb.
We can’t blame Latinists, however, for the false prohibition against beginning a sentence with a conjunction, since the Romans did it too (Et tu, Brute?). The linguist Arnold Zwicky has speculated that well-meaning English teachers may have come up with this one to break students of incessantly starting every sentence with “and.” The truth is that conjunctions are legitimately used to join words, phrases, clauses, sentences—and even paragraphs.
Perhaps these “rules” persist because they are so easy to remember, and the “errors” are so easy to spot. Ironically, this is a case where the clueless guy who’s never heard of a preposition or a conjunction or an infinitive is more likely to be right.
As bloggers at Grammarphobia.com and former New York Times editors, we’ve seen otherwise reasonable, highly educated people turn their writing upside down to sidestep imaginary errors. There’s a simple test that usually exposes a phony rule of grammar: If it makes your English stilted and unnatural, it’s probably a fraud.
We can’t end this without mentioning Raymond Chandler’s response when a copy editor at the Atlantic Monthly decided to “fix” his hard-boiled prose: “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split.”
Subscribe now for more of Smithsonian's coverage on history, science and nature.
Comments (57)
+ View All Comments
I agree with Gustav: the 'to' that is generally considered to be part of the infinitive has no prepositional effect at all, so considering it to a prepositional marker is a misnomer. It is a particle, used simply to mark the verb as infinitive, rather than a conjugated form.
Posted by A. Jory on February 11,2013 | 02:50 PM
My very detailed response on the Huffington Post: "Why Only Some Grammar Rules Are Breakable." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-joel-hoffman/why-only-some-grammar-rul_b_2649062.html
Posted by J.M. Hoffman on February 10,2013 | 06:03 PM
Not that Wikipedia is the final arbiter of all problems grammatical, but the definition it gives is actually quite good: "Infinitive is a grammatical term used to refer to certain verb forms that exist in many languages. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. In traditional descriptions of English, the infinitive is the basic dictionary form of a verb when used non-finitely, with or without the particle to." The simple fact that English infinitives are not marked by a specific ending, as in French "manger", where the "-er" ending is the infinitive marker, and also that English infinitive forms share their written and spoken form with several inflected forms whose ending is a zero-ending (I eat, you eat, we eat, they eat vs. he/she eats) does definitely not mean that "to" is a necessary part of an infinitive - it's just often used by grammarians to indicate unambiguously that the following verb form is indeed an infinitive. In the phrase "I walk" the word "walk" is not an infinitive, although there is no (visible/audible) marker present for "1st person singular, present simple tense". In the phrase "Did she walk?" the word "walk" clearly IS an infinitive, even without the "to". BTW, in the "Cambridge International Dictionary of English", lying on my desk next to my keyboard, one of the definitions of "to" is "prep, used before a verb to indicate to show that it is in the infinitive". So, contrary to what some here seem to believe, of course it is a preposition, and not part of the indivisible infinitive. The infinitive itself can, of course, never be split: none who speak English have been so audacious or reckless as to boldly split the word "walk" in a sentence.
Posted by Gustav on February 10,2013 | 08:46 AM
YAY! Someone is granting people freedom of expression! heheh
Posted by Cherie on February 8,2013 | 01:22 PM
Benito, I feel that grammar has changed and developed over many hundreds of years (much like the meanings and semantics of words, and their signs and signifiers, have developed and changed over the course of human history). As such i do not believe there is such a things as Grammatical Law in so far as 'grammatical law' is only what is considered the accepted norm at the time of writing. Grammar (like our law system) is a man made construction and is as fallible, flexible and changeable as the humans who engendered it.
Posted by fin5csg on February 8,2013 | 09:27 AM
Muphry's Law is in prime form in this comment section.
Posted by Andrew on February 7,2013 | 12:16 AM
It makes sense to distinguish between style and grammar rules. Just because something is grammatically possible does not make it good style.
Posted by Maximus Planudes on February 4,2013 | 11:06 AM
@Benito "The 'to' of infinitive (as in 'to run') is very much a part of the infinitive. The 'to' is in fact what makes an infinitive an infinitive. Otherwise the terms 'run' and 'to run' would mean the same thing grammatically." This isn't true. Infinitive is the root form of a word. After a modal, we use the infinitive without "to". "I would like", "he can run"... you wouldn't say, "he can runs" because the verb has to be infinitive. The same goes for when a verb follows an auxiliary: "The cat doesn't like water," not, "The cat doesn't likes water." There are several other situations in which one must use the infinitive, but not "to". "To" is often attached to the infinitive, but it is not part of it.
Posted by bk on February 3,2013 | 02:58 PM
How, exactly, do three minor rules that are largely ignored comprise "most" of grammar, given how many grammar rules there are for the English language?
Posted by Darr Sandberg on January 31,2013 | 03:42 PM
I am concerned that Patricia T. O’Conner does not seem to understand what my developmental English students do quickly--that (1) words are not a particular part of speech, that parts of speech are functions in sentence structure filled by words, and that (2) a preposition is a preposition because it is connecting a noun to a sentence and in doing so creates a descriptive phrase. The "to" in "to go" is not a preposition. "Go" is not an infinitive. It is the base or stem principle part of the verb. In English it takes two words to form an infinitive (unlike most other languages that have a one word form). Because the two words work together as a single unit, it is best not to split the infinitive. However, it is allowed in modern English if not doing so would create awkward phrasing.
Posted by Christine Cunningham on January 31,2013 | 01:57 PM
"Et tu, Brute" is most certainly Latin. However, it is not a valid example of Latin beginning a sentence with a conjunction. These words are Shakespeare's, not Julius Caesar's. There is absolutely no evidence that Caesar ever uttered them!
Posted by Georgine Brabec on January 31,2013 | 12:19 PM
I must correct my previous comment, wherein I was thinking "nominative" but wrote "objective."... Just between you and I, I think what the authors write here is fairly commonplace but still worth repeating. The solecism that grates most on my ear, however, is exemplified in the first phrase of my first sentence. Presumably educated people have got in in their heads that pronouns when combined with other pronouns or with nouns must always employ the NOMINATIVE case (except that they probably aren't familiar with the concept of grammatical case and just repeat what they commonly hear). People who would laugh at "they told she about I" think it's correct grammar to say "they told she and he about he and I." What's the cause? Bad teaching? Imagine this little dialogue: MOM: "What are you and Justin doing today?" SONNY: "Him and me are going to the mall." MOM: "He and I. He and I are going to the mall." LATER THAT SAME DAY. MOM: "Where did you and Justin get those new baseballs?" SONNY: At the sports shop they gave them to he and I as a prize for being first in the store." MOM: "Well, isn't that nice for you and he!" And so it goes... Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Most-of-What-You-Think-You-Know-About-Grammar-is-Wrong-187940351.html#ixzz2JV9HYuvR Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter
Posted by Ron Healy on January 30,2013 | 05:52 PM
Michael Horton, your last sentence should read "I hope it will stop me from making the same mistakes". You murdered "hopefully" in the modern style there.
Posted by George Brims on January 30,2013 | 01:30 PM
Wonderful !
Posted by Terry M Reasoner on January 30,2013 | 12:29 PM
+ View All Comments