In the 17th century, John Dryden, deciding that ending a sentence with a preposition was 'not elegant' because you couldn't do it in Latin, set about ruining some of his best prose by rewriting it so that 'the end he aimed at' became 'the end at which he aimed', and so on. They are followed by an object: from me to you.
But remarkably persistent.Ģ The things one has to put up with Prepositions relate one word or phrase to another, typically to express place (to the office, in the net) or time (before the flood, after the goldrush).
This 'rule' is not just half-baked: it's fully baked, with a fried egg and slice of pineapple on top. Adverbs should go where they sound most natural, often immediately after the to: to boldly go, to personally guarantee. Stubbornly to resist splitting infinitives can sound awkward or, worse, ambiguous: 'He offered personally to guarantee the loan that the Clintons needed to buy their house' makes it unclear whether the offer, or the guarantee, was personal. 1 To infinitive and beyond Geoffrey K Pullum, a scarily erudite linguistics professor – and, unless this is an internet hoax, keyboard player in the 1960s with Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band – calls them 'zombie rules: though dead, they shamble mindlessly on … ' And none more so than the one that says the particle to and the infinitive form of the verb should not be separated, as in Star Trek's eloquent mission statement 'to boldly go where no man has gone before'.
