History of The Term
It was not until the very end of the 19th century that terminology emerged to describe the construction. According to the main etymological dictionaries, the earliest use of the term split infinitive on record dates from 1897, with infinitive-splitting and infinitive-splitter following in 1926 and 1927 respectively. The now rare cleft infinitive is slightly older, attested from 1893. The term compound split infinitive is not found in these dictionaries and appears to be very recent.
This terminology implies analysing the full infinitive as a two-word infinitive, which not all grammarians accept. As one who used "infinitive" to mean the single-word verb, Otto Jespersen challenged the epithet: "'To' is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling 'the good man' a 'split nominative'." However, no alternative terminology has been proposed.
Read more about this topic: Split Infinitive
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or term:
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (18041881)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (18991986)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (18741945)
“Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the wrong crowd read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who werent planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)