Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before!
Star Trek, 1966–1969
With these words a new era in science-fiction was launched, and the mission not only of the Enterprise but of an entire franchise was declared.
But these words also irritated an awful lot of grammar purists.
“To boldly go?” they objected. “That’s a split infinitive. That’s bad grammar!”
But why? What is so wrong with saying to boldly go? To understand that, you have to understand something about the history of English.
Continue reading “To Boldly Split Infinitives”