Sometimes Pinker works a little too hard at this debunking campaign. Our two-word infinitives should not be governed by the old one-word rule-meaning that Captain Kirk was just fine, when he said “to boldly go.” Pinker pooh-poohs the idea that words must always stick to their original meaning: “decimate” means “to cut by ten percent” in Latin now people use it to mean “more or less destroy,” and that’s fine with him. For example, he lambastes the language scolds who wag their fingers over such evils as split infinitives-absurdly, Pinker says, because the rule against them is based on the fact that infinitives such as “to go” are single, unsplittable words in Latin and other languages that arose from it.
Style has all the fun stuff that makes usage guides so popular.
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