knowingly to offend....or
to offend knowingly.

You could stand a chance of being corrected. Slightly less so, now that my father is no longer with us.

J_R_Hartley wrote: "knowingly to offend....or
to offend knowingly.
You could stand a chance of being corrected."

Same issue with the oh2doula's choice of header. Split infinitives offend my tender sensibilities.

"You could stand a chance of being corrected. Slightly less so, now that my father is no longer with us."

Apparently very slightly less so, especially if very slightly less equals zero.

"Love", "pet", "hen", etc., (they use different words in different parts of the country) can be charming or they can be patronising/offensive, all depending on the circumstances. I have been told that in Devon it's "my lover", even between men (instead of "mate"), even on one occasion by a policeman giving out a speeding ticket. But it's never happened to me.

"Slightly less so, now that my father is no longer with us."

You have NO idea how much self-control it's taken to avoid making that point.

Somewhere up there, there's a patron saint of obsessive grammatical pedants who's getting more plenary indulgences for me than an overbooked Ryanair flight to Lourdes could manage.

The old man would write letters to the BBC decrying falling standards....

J_R_Hartley says --

"knowingly to offend....or
to offend knowingly.
You could stand a chance of being corrected. Slightly less so, now that my father is no longer with us."

Gadzooks! Can't believe I did that, I being once a teacher of English grammar to college students. I suppose it was the feeling of informality on the thread that led me astray. So sorry for all the offended sensibilities.

Split infinitives are the least of the communication problems here. Slackers who are too idle to use upper case letters irritate the **** out of me - you know who you are. What they don't realise is that their affectation degrades any valid point they might have as they clearly can't be bothered to communicate properly.

The split infinitive reached its zenith with Star Trek and is sadly becoming mainstream now.

"You could stand a chance of being corrected." Should that be "You might stand a chance...?" I don't know. Somebody tell me.

stfc wrote: "Slackers who are too idle to use upper case letters irritate the **** out of me..."

What about people who decline to type what they wish to say, and use asterisks?

Yes, that's ****ing irritating too.

BTW, anyone interested in the current status of split infinitives among grammarians might like to take a look at these two sources: http://www.bartleby.com/64/C001/059.html leads you to The American Heritage® Book of English Usage.

I rather like this one since it points out that by splitting infinitives I am in the company of, among others, John Donne, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, Willa Cather, and, of course, Capt. Kirk.

The other is http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxspliti.html. It delves a bit more into the minutia and ambiguities of split infinitives.

"It delves a bit more into the minutia and ambiguities of split infinitives.

Minutia????

You might wish to - when you have nothing better to carefully turn your mind to - understand there are some wrongly imported Latinisms us obsessive pedants won't put up with.

We obsessive pedants.

There is nothing wrong with split infinitives. The silly 'no split infinitive' rule was invented by insane and evil grammarians, who thought English should be Latin.

In Latin (and Romance languages and others, no doubt), the infinitive is ONE WORD. So it cannot be split, no matter how hard you try. This is not true in English, because it has a different grammatical structure. You all know this, so let's not have any more nonsense about split infinitives.

flanner, you just wrote that in order to invite a suggested correction of "up with which we will not put", didn't you ? :-)

Not to mention flanneruk's own split infinitive "nothing better to carefully turn your mind to."

Oh. Funny!! Just realized the whole first paragraph is one big split infinitive. Good one, flanneruk. Nicely done.

though flanneur is IMO amongst the most eloquent of Fodor scribes, at times his lack of a proper edikation is belied by elementary mistakes in grammar.

Oh no. I think flanner's post was much too well wrought to have "mistakes." Don't know, of course, but I think it was a delightfully clever take-in.

It was big shock being called "love" by men and women in West Yorkshire but to be called "duck" by peole in South Yorkshire was weird.

hi bilboburger

It was big shock being called "love" by men and women in West Yorkshire but to be called "duck" by peole in South Yorkshire was weird.>>

it was a bit of a shock when we moved to cornwall to be called "maid" by people half my age, and an even greater one when some chap addressed me as "me 'ansome".

after 11 years, I take it in my stride now.

regards, ann