Bad Advice. John E. McIntyre
highly likely to result in (a) awkward language or (b) outright ambiguity. But this peculiar superstition has got a hold on schoolrooms and editorial offices and will not die.
Bryan A. Garner, in Garner’s Modern English Usage, quotes George Bernard Shaw: “There is a busybody on your staff who devotes a lot of his time to chasing split infinitives. Every good literary craftsman splits infinitives when the sense demands it. I call for the immediate dismissal of this pedant. It is of no consequence whether he decides to go quickly or quickly to go or to quickly go. The important thing is that he should go at once.”
Raymond Chandler wrote a letter, now famous, to the editor of The Atlantic Monthly in which he complained about the editing of an article: “By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”
Do not split an auxiliary verb from the main verb with an adverb.
Over the years, the split infinitive superstition, wrong in the first place, has been expanded into another area, the belief that compound verbs must not be split.
Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage writes: “In a compound verb (have seen) with an adverb, the adverb comes between the auxiliary and the participle (“I have never seen her”); or, if there are two or more auxiliaries, immediately after the first auxiliary (“I have always been intending to go to Paris”); that order is changed only to obtain emphasis, as in “I never have seen her” (with stress on “have”). ... There is, however, a tendency to move the adverb from its rightful and natural position for inadequate reasons. ...”
The tendency Partridge alludes to has been prevalent among American journalists, the “split-verb” prohibition apparently having been invented by nineteenth-century American newspaper editors and propagated among their descendants and journalism school faculty. Journalists have been so schooled to write things like “we always have done it this way” that it sounds more natural to them than the idiomatic “we have always done it this way.”
This nonsensical rule was kept on life support by The Associated Press Stylebook until 2019, when the stylebook editors were persuaded to drop it and announced the decision at the national conference of ACES: The Society for Editors.
Better late than never.
Do not use none as a plural.
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage opens the none entry colorfully: “A specter is haunting English usage—the specter of the singular none. No one knows who set abroad the notion that none could only be a singular, but abroad it is. ... Mary Vaiana Taylor, in an article titled “The Folklore of Usage” in American Speech (April 1974), says that 60 percent of the graduate teaching assistants she surveyed marked none with a plural verb as wrong in students’ papers.”
While “none” can certainly mean “not one,” the etymology that most of the singularists assume to be correct, the word can also mean “not any,” and both senses have been current in the language since Old English.
The Old English nan, “none,” “not one,” was indeed a singular, as MWDEU points out. But it was inflected and had a plural form. Over the years, the singular form survived as none in both singular and plural uses, and you can use it as either, as context indicates.
That cannot be used to refer to human beings, only to animals or inanimate objects.
The Associated Press Stylebook distinction that who refers to people and named animals, that to inanimate objects and unnamed animals is generally the case—but not universally so.
Garner’s Modern American Usage says bluntly, “It’s a silly fetish to say that who is the only relative pronoun that can refer to humans.”
There are two major contexts in which that is an appropriate pronoun to refer to human beings.
The first is in references to groups of people, as in “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2 and Handel’s Messiah). The second is in reference to a person whose identity is not known, as in “The girl that I marry will have to be / As soft and pink as a nursery” (Irving Berlin, Annie Get Your Gun).
You want to argue that that can never refer to human beings, you have the Authorized Version and Irving Berlin to contend with, and you’re going to lose.
Always delete that.
There is weird hostility out there to an innocuous relative pronoun.
You can safely delete that when two short clauses are joined: “She said she was sick.” No one will misunderstand or object.
But some editors and teachers go too far and delete the thats wholesale. Even the Associated Press Stylebook indicates a number of cases in which the relative pronoun is necessary:
Item: When a time element intervenes between the verb and the dependent clause: “She said Sunday that she was sick.”
Item: When certain verbs are used: advocate, asset, contend, declare, estimate, make clear, point out, propose, and state.
Item: When the subordinate clause begins with after, although, because, before, in addition to, until, and while. “She said that after she ate the oysters she was sick.”
Moreover, if you have two subordinate clauses, the second of which is introduced by that, you will do the reader and the cause of parallelism a favor by including the first one as well: “She said that she was sick and that she planned to see her doctor in the morning.”
When that is there and does no harm, take your hands off the keyboard.
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