Today we're gonna talk about split infinitives. First of all, what is an infinitive? It's a form of the verb that has to in front of it. And it doesn't indicate anything about tense or about person or ...

For those who boldly violate the Prime Directive by trying to enrich the general public’s understanding of English grammar and thus change the planetary culture, each tiny triumph is something to ...

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing. In his new ...

Gerunds are the -ing form of a verb, and infinitives are the to + base form. These words can be confusing; they combine the meaning of a verb with the grammar of a noun. My father asked me to phone ...

My day was as empty as a human resources manager’s imagination, so I was heading for a pint or two of Smithwick’s with my barfly associates, the Afternoon Travelers, when an anomaly loomed on the ...

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: ...

My friend Oliver Kamm and I have fallen out. He has a new book out in February called Accidence Will Happen: The Non-Pedantic Guide to English Usage. The blurb says that “to deliberately split an ...

This is a video about using infinitives in French. Lots of common French verbs, used in any tense, are followed immediately by an infinitive. The infinitive is usually translated in English as ‘to + ...