Nihil,
I can no longer abide by your incorrect grammar assertions. Your precious infinitives can be split. The rule has changed:
From the NYTimes - 11/1/98
Split Infinitives: It's Just Fine to Boldly Go
By PATRICIA T. O'CONNER
or grammarians, lexicographers and linguists, it's the Thing That Will Not Die. Just when they think it's buried once and for all, the corpse rises again to haunt a new generation.
The creature walking among us, if you haven't already guessed, is the old "rule" of grammar that says we shouldn't split an infinitive. It's been pronounced dead every few years for more than a century, but it just won't be laid to rest.
In the hearts of true believers, it's still a sin to ever put an adverb (like "ever") between the word "to" and the infinitive form of a verb.
The latest post-mortem comes from Oxford University Press, which publishes the granddaddy of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as baby dictionaries of every size and description.
A couple of Oxford's new dictionaries -- one just published here and one published in Britain in August -- include usage notes about the split infinitive that essentially reiterate what their predecessors have said: Rule? What rule? (Or words to that effect.)
The wording in the new books, the Oxford American Desk Dictionary and the New Oxford Dictionary of English, is only slightly stronger than in previous versions, but the message is the same: If it sounds good to split, go ahead and do it.
The Oxford editors didn't expect the new usage notes to excite a lot of comment. But then, they didn't count on the power of a sales pitch. "Infinitives SHOULD be split," trumpeted a news release introducing the British dictionary. The hyperbolic headline not only overemphasized the issue but also overstated the case.
At any rate, what was old news in the world of lexicography -- the demise of the split-infinitive taboo -- apparently came as a surprise to the English-speaking world at large. The response from the British press and dozens of American newspapers, as well as countless Internet users, was a collective "Good golly!" The opinions quoted in the articles ranged from disgust ("I do not dine with people who split infinitives") to delight ("I think it's terrific").
Frank Abate, editor in chief of Oxford's dictionary programs in the United States, has spent much of his time lately answering calls from reporters about the American book. "You'd think we were splitting the atom or something," he said.
So what's all the fuss about? Not much, it turns out. Grammarians have argued until they were blue in the face that you can't really split an infinitive, since "to" isn't part of the infinitive. Sometimes it's not present at all. In a sentence like "I helped him to break the code," the "to" could easily be dropped. And in sentences like "I let him break the code" and "I saw him break the code," the infinitive (break) must go it alone.
Technicalities aside, what we call a split infinitive has been around a lot longer than its detractors. Writers used it with impunity from the 1300s until well into the 19th century. All that changed in 1864, when the dean of Canterbury, Henry Alford, published a widely popular grammar book called "A Plea for the Queen's English." Alford, a classics scholar who sought to civilize the English of Shakespeare and Milton by imposing on it the rules of Latin grammar, couldn't bear to see an adverb slip between "to" and an infinitive. (Latin infinitives, you see, have no such prepositional markers.)
As early as 1868, grammarians were challenging Alford's edict, arguing that one can't graft Latin sentence structure onto English, a language that's essentially Germanic. But the damage had been done. The ban on splitting infinitives was firmly planted in the popular imagination. So were other leftover Latinisms, including the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition.
Early in this century, such heavyweights as the linguist Otto Jespersen, the British lexicographer Henry Fowler and the American grammarian and philologist George Curme argued that splitting is not only acceptable but often preferable. Most 20th-century dictionaries and style guides agree that clarity is what counts. There's a difference, for instance, between "He learned to quickly read" and "He learned quickly to read." And when "quickly" comes at the end, it could refer to either the learning or the reading.
What won't come quickly, one suspects, is an end to the splitting headache. George Bernard Shaw, a perennial sufferer, once complained to The Times of London about an overzealous editor with a wooden ear: "There is a pedant on your staff who spends far too much of his time searching for split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman uses a split infinitive if he thinks the sense demands it. I call for this man's instant dismissal; it matters not whether he decides to quickly go or to go quickly or quickly to go. Go he must, and at once."
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