“The day Western civilization ended”

Happy Star Trek Day! Also, English is not Latin

About a decade ago, in my second round of seminary schooling, my fellow diaconal candidates and I had a canon law class with a punctilious professor, a priest and canon lawyer, who had very specific preferences for dotted i’s and crossed t’s. On the first day of class, while setting standards for papers written for his class, he portentously declared the end of Western civilization to date to September 8, 1966. The reason: On that date “Star Trek” debuted—and split the infinitive “to go” in its title sequence (“to boldly go”). Despite this catastrophe for English standards in popular culture, he assured us, in his class there would be no split infinitives.

I, of course, raised my hand. I have a regrettable tendency to contribute too early and often in classroom settings, and in my seminary classes I generally tried to limit myself to something like one comment every 30 minutes, and to pick my interventions carefully. This was probably not the wisest occasion for an intervention, or the best first impression I might have hoped to make on my professor. My self-control was at a low ebb, I guess.

Anyway, I remarked that split infinitives have been used in English for centuries by great stylists like John Donne, Wordsworth, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln. I also noted that the 19th-century prescriptivist rule against them is based on Latin grammar, in which infinitives are a single word and thus cannot be split, and that most English style guides today agree there’s no reason to impose this limitation onto English. (Well, I may not have actually said every word of that, but it’s convergent with whatever I did say.)

Father’s serious response: “I don’t care!” He went on to make clear that the nuns had taught him that infinitives were not to be split, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. (I thought of him many years later reading an essay by a well-known priest, a jeremiad about gender theory that made room for an eyeroll about split infinitives, as if these, too, offend the Lord above.)

While I wasn’t taught by the nuns (a couple of years in Catholic school notwithstanding, I was raised Protestant), I had a grandmother with a passion for English who drilled respect for the rules into her children and grandchildren. Just the other day on Facebook I was ranting about misused apostrophes, and one of my uncles asked me if I was “going all Grandma on the errors people make,” which, of course, I was (mostly for humorous effect). I grew up with all the rules: Never start sentences with conjunctions or end them with prepositions. Write in complete sentences; avoid the passive voice; don’t use double negatives. The subject is who; the object is whom. Use less with noncount nouns, fewer with count nouns. Pictures are hung; people are hanged. Etc., etc.

Well, I still speak and write in conformity with most of the rules most of the time. But I’ve also learned (see what I did there?) that some rules are made for breaking, and some never should have been rules to begin with. For example, English isn’t Latin, and the fact that the title narration of a Latin version of the “Star Trek” might say “fortiter ire quo nemo antecessit”—literally, “courageously to go where no one has gone before”—does not make the latter better English than the canonical English narration.

On the contrary, “to boldly go” is stylistically the best solution. On the one hand, “boldly to go” would ruin the parallelism. Each clause begins with “to”:

to explore strange new worlds;
to seek out new life and new civilizations;
to boldly go where no man has gone before!

On the other hand, “to go boldly” gives the final emphatic place to the boldness rather than the going. The going is bold, but it’s the going that matters.

There’s also, perhaps, a matter of rhythm. Someone pointed out a ways back that “to bold-ly go where no man has gone be-fore” is almost iambic in its rhythm. By contrast, “bold-ly to go” starts on a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, which is less elegant; “to go bold-ly where” likewise has two stressed syllables followed by two unstressed. I’m not sure how decisive this is, especially since the first two clauses are less iambic, but certainly “to boldly go” slaps in a way that neither of the obvious alternatives do.

Anyway, I wish to cheerfully raise a glass and toast my canon law professor, wherever he may be, on this 58th anniversary of “the end of Western civilization”—which I intend to observe by continuing my family viewing of Netflix’s animated Star Trek: Prodigy series.