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The things people get pedantic about are never the things which are the actual rules of English. In simple terms, if something were an actual rule, nobody would need to be pedantic about it, because everyone would follow it unconsciously, like they follow the rule that adjectives precede nouns in the simplest possible case, not the opposite, or in any other order: "The big red ball", not "The ball red, big", or "The red ball big". The things which pedants go on about are best seen as a failed attempt to "improve" the language, an exercise in conlang construction using an extant language as the base. This is how it was with the prohibition on splitting infinitives: A split infinitive is perfectly good English, but it is impossible in Latin, where the infinitive form is one word. So, operating on the dogma that Latin was more fashionable... more correct than English, the pedants attempted to modify English to be more Latinate by insisting that splitting infinitives was ungrammatical in English. It was only ungrammatical in their little conlang, which never quite caught on. The pedants did have one victory: The Latin word for "debt" is spelled with a 'b', "debitum", whereas the former English spelling was fairly phonetic: "dette", or similar, with no 'b'. The pedants got most English speakers to accept the conlang spelling, "debt", as "more correct", as part of their larger, largely unsuccessful, program to Latin-ify English. |