From 9 famous quotes that are (technically) grammatically incorrect:
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
This line (and its newer version, with no one in place of no man) is as famous for being “wrong” as it is for being from the intro to each episode of Star Trek.
What’s “wrong”?
It’s a “split infinitive,” with boldly improperly between to and go.
Is it really wrong?
No. The “rule” against split infinitives is just a grammatical superstition. It was invented in the 1700s by a grammarian who wanted to “improve” the language along Latin lines. English, however, is not Latin, and the option of putting words between to and the verb root has always existed and has often been made use of by respected authors.
There are times when a sentence works better if you don’t do it, sure; that doesn’t make it a rule, and the Star Trek line is not one of those times, either. “Boldly to go”? “To go boldly”? No.
Link to the rest at 9 famous quotes that are (technically) grammatically incorrect
It used to be (still is?) a rite of passage at Yale that all Freshmen who took the (somewhat mandated) English Poetry class had to recite from memory the first few pages of the Canterbury Tales in proper (Middle English) pronunciation.
To this day, if you get a group of Yalies of a certain age drunk enough, you can get a sub-group to launch into “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…” until they peter out.
K – I apologize for being asleep at the comment switch. Your contributions are consistently excellent as are those of several other regulars here.
I remember trying to get my mouth around Middle English in college and finding it more difficult than French pronunciation.
(Oh, god, I made him put the captcha back in…)
No apologies necessary. I knew, when I dropped that second link in, that I was playing with fire, but my finger had (as always) gotten ahead of my brain. 🙂
Perhaps you’ll treat us to an apocryphal segment, “The Mouse-Finger’s Tale”…
Sadly, my Foundations of English Literature (I) instructor didn’t do the Chaucer-in-Middle-English thing. Nothing so simple for him: He demanded Beowulf. (But then, he was primarily a Milton scholar, so unpredictability was predictable.)
I did Old English courses, too, so “Hwaet we Gardena” is also in my (aging) repertoire. That is, of course, the major innovation of Middle English poetry — moving from Germanic alliterative half-lines (alas — bring them back!) to Continental-style stanzaic forms.
I like “The Mouse-Finger’s Tale” concept… 🙂
Italian even earlier with Dante? I wonder why Chaucer didn’t set the fashion in English
He did, while Middle English was still in effect. But Middle English had regional dialects (The author of Gawain and the Green Knight was from a different part of England) and it took a while for all that to settle out. I hate to quote Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer), but here it’s not wrong (you can tell that its source is British by the spelling of “standardise”):
“Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre.[52] Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentametre, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him.[53] The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve’s Tale.
The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects.[54] This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a part – remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English.
Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer’s poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience.”
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For more on Middle English regional dialects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gawain_Poet
It used to be (still is?) a rite of passage at Yale that all Freshmen who took the (somewhat mandated) English Poetry class had to recite from memory the first few pages of the Canterbury Tales in proper (Middle English) pronunciation.
To this day, if you get a group of Yalies of a certain age drunk enough, you can get a sub-group to launch into “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote…” until they peter out.
I had a long comment reply to this (“why not Chaucer”), but alas it had 2 links (I should know better) and is now trapped in PV’s spam bucket. If he doesn’t notice soon, I’ll recreate it.
Sigh… Here’s the reconstruction…
It was Chaucer, but Chaucer’s language was Middle English, and that had several established regional dialects (the Gawain Poet used a different one).
To quote (an unusually accurate) Wikipedia, “Chaucer wrote in continental accentual-syllabic metre, a style which had developed in English literature since around the 12th century as an alternative to the alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre.[52] Chaucer is known for metrical innovation, inventing the rhyme royal, and he was one of the first English poets to use the five-stress line, a decasyllabic cousin to the iambic pentametre, in his work, with only a few anonymous short works using it before him.[53] The arrangement of these five-stress lines into rhyming couplets, first seen in his The Legend of Good Women, was used in much of his later work and became one of the standard poetic forms in English. His early influence as a satirist is also important, with the common humorous device, the funny accent of a regional dialect, apparently making its first appearance in The Reeve’s Tale.
The poetry of Chaucer, along with other writers of the era, is credited with helping to standardise the London Dialect of the Middle English language from a combination of the Kentish and Midlands dialects.[54] This is probably overstated; the influence of the court, chancery and bureaucracy – of which Chaucer was a part – remains a more probable influence on the development of Standard English.
Modern English is somewhat distanced from the language of Chaucer’s poems owing to the effect of the Great Vowel Shift some time after his death. This change in the pronunciation of English, still not fully understood, makes the reading of Chaucer difficult for the modern audience.”
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More on the Gawain Poet. “The language of the poems shows that the poet was a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland, who are sometimes (following the suggestion of academic John Burrow) collectively called the Ricardian Poets in reference to the reign of Richard II of England.[4] All four poems of the Cotton MS Nero A X manuscript are in the same Middle English dialect, localised to the area of north-western Staffordshire and south-eastern Cheshire, in the English Midlands. This may merely indicate the dialect of the scribe responsible for copying the poems, but there is good evidence that the dialect of poet and scribe were very similar.[5] It is, therefore, thought most likely that the poet was a native of east Cheshire or west Staffordshire and was writing in the latter part of the 14th century: based particularly on the narrative voice of Pearl, the poet is thought to have been male.[3] Internal evidence indicates that all four works were probably written by the same author, though their similar dialect and presence in the same manuscript have usually been taken as the strongest evidence of common authorship.”
“The poet began writing during a time of rapid change and development in English literature. His language was arguably also influenced by 14th-century social developments, particularly the movement toward a more anglicised ruling class and political identity, and by changes in the English language, primarily driven by exposure to dialects of French.”
The general term I use is “schoolmar’m” rules — pointless and non-native to the actual language which is not now, and has never been, Latin. It’s the same impulse that drives central planning in governments, namely “we know best”.
Best usage in a living language is defined by best users. Most European national languages waited to become “official” for a prominent/high status author (or more than one) — early for Spanish with Cervantes, later for the Scandinavians. English, of course, has both Shakespeare and the King James Bible committee. Once that happens, there is an “official” version that drifts only slowly, and the same number of dialectical variants there always were.
The fashions in “best users” vary, but the rules-recommending grammarians are really just status markers (you are educated enough to know and apply those arbitrary rules), and they survive on that basis, not very differently from Ivy League universities these days.
The OP undersells what those “grammarians” were trying to do by neglecting their context. It wasn’t just “seventeenth-century,” but “English Civil War era.” It was about class warfare before that concept became popularized in the nineteenth century, true, but even more it was anti-Irish/anti-Scottish impetus.
And those rules? Alles ist verboten, daß nicht verbinden sind. (Which, by my count, breaks four of the nine cited “rules” in a language even farther from Latin than is English.)
Not really. First, the OP says “1700s,” not 17th century. Prescriptive grammar did have its beginnings in the 17th century, but casting it as cavaliers vs. roundheads, or the like, is a stretch. The two great contributions to the genre were George Fox railing ineffectually against the singular “you,” and John Dryden deciding that it was poor style to end a sentence with a preposition and going back and revising his earlier work. Prescriptive grammar really got going in the 18th century, when we have Jonathan Swift lobbying for the creation of an academy to regulate the language, and Robert Baker blundering about offering half-baked opinions. But, contra the OP, the rule against the so-called split infinitive first appears in the 19th century.
There certainly is a strong class element to much of this, but a lot of it is about regulating language within the gentry more than setting the gentry apart from the rabble. This was the era when provincial gentry were sending their sons to boarding schools to purge their provincial accents. Early language books were a subset of etiquette books, teaching the socially anxious how better to fit in. Making this out to be class warfare is anachronistic.
I crossed two different OPs… but there was a lot of fallout from the Glorious Revolution and Civil War in the “grammarian movement,” and I’ll stand by a much-earlier-than-the-19th-century origin of prescriptive grammar as an anti-Irish/Scottish political tool.