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 ...

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 ...

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 have on occasion split the infinitive and one should never do that. Yet it’s hard to remember what is so bad about splitting infinitives, except that it offends those people who had their grammar ...