VFR’s stand against the split infinitive is starting to have an effect

Svein Sellanraa writes at the new traditionalist blog The Orthosphere:

I was actually working on a post very similar to this one, though mine’s specifically about how a reactionary can live well in the modern world. My main point was that we should try not to become terminally embittered and angry. (I honestly nearly wrote “to not become” there, then thought about Larry Auster and corrected myself.) …

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Laura Wood writes:

You are changing the culture, one split infinitive at a time.

You should start the Auster Infinitive Foundation (meetings and awards to be announced).

March 1

Howard Sutherland writes:

Expect this, however, to be a campaign of infinite—not to say infinitive—duration. Are you going to take on “hopefully” next? I am hopeful that you will.

And after that, perhaps you will focus your linguistic laser designator on “they/them/theirs” as singulars and the equally bad “he and she / him and her / his or hers” (or as post-modern law professors would insist, “she and he / her and him / hers or his”—that is, when they don’t simply refuse to use masculine forms at all). In English, as with every European language I know anything about, it is—or, until recently, was—clearly understood by anyone with a rudimentary education that unattributed masculine singular pronouns express the collective. I read in Spanish, French and Italian pretty regularly and have yet to see this “gender-sensitive” syntactical mutilation in them—and Lord knows there is no shortage of destructive leftists in each of those cultures. Maybe they just haven’t got around to Newspeaking their mother tongues yet.

Keep up the good fight, one outrage against usage at a time!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 29, 2012 11:26 AM | Send