Sometimes it's appropriate to split infinitives

[xanthamarioff]

Seen on a magazine cover in the grocery store checkout yesterday (I think it was the Oprah magazine):

"How not to look fat in a swimsuit"

What, you mean there's a correct way to look fat in a swimsuit and we've all been doing it wrong all these years? (I'm pretty sure they meant "How to not look fat in a swimsuit"... or better yet, "How to look

Comments

[blockhouse]

Or perhaps "How to look not fat in a swimsuit?"

Anyway, I thought it was okay to split infinitives if it was to negate them, as in this case. But if you split an infinitive with an adverb (e.g. "To boldly go where no one has gone before."), you deserve to be shot by a squadron of grammar teachers.

I dunno. You're the professional. I got a D+ in freshman English at TJ.

[xanthamarioff]

Shuddring old-school readers is one of the reasons that simply saying "How to look slim..." is a better construction.

[outofsynch]

i don't even know what an infinitive is, and i got through most of grammar lessons with a c.
my grades improved dramtically once i no longer had to determine declinsions and go through the tedious process of maping sentences. :)

[blockhouse]

The infinitive is the "basic" form of a verb, without conjugation. In English, they usually follow the form "to x." Examples would be: "to read," "to swim," "to flagellate," etc.

The infinitive is usually given in most foreign language dictionaries as the "dictionary form" of a verb. For example, if you look up the verb "read" in an English-German dictionary, it will say "lesen" which is the German infinitive. Then you can conjugate it depending on how you want to use the verb.

[blockhouse]

Just FYI. Not that you actually cared or anything . . .

[xanthamarioff]

You've had more formal grammar lessons than me! ;)