GEORGE BERNARD SHAW was once so angry with a subeditor that he complained to the newspaper. “I ask you, sir,” Shaw wrote, “to put this man out.” The cause of his fury? The editor had insisted on ...

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 ...

An "infinitive" in English is a verb preceded by the word to, as in to study. Many English verbs can be followed by a grammatical structure that contains an infinitive and is known as an "infinitive ...

When you look up a verb in the dictionary you find the infinitive form.‎ In English it’s made up of two words: to swim. ‎ But in French it’s just one, nager. ‎ And if you want to say something more ...

A recent comment thread brought up the old debate about split infinitives. I’m for them, in the sense that I think there is nothing inherently ungrammatical or even clumsy about them. Sometimes they ...

Reader Don in Los Angeles County wrote recently with a question about a well-known grammar issue called a “split infinitive.” “I learned about them 50 years ago and I am somewhat sensitive about them ...

I don't think there was ever anything objectively wrong with splitting infinitives. I think it arose when prescriptive grammarians laid down that as the Latin infinitive, being one word, is ...