Split Ininitives?

APPROVED

BLUF: 

• The prohibition against split infinities is one of those "rules" the BBC warned you about in their most-excellent series, The Adventure of English.

• Which is to say, it never was an actual rule.

This article satisfies Squid Commo Objective #2: Suffer not bullyery and Objective #3: Clarify and simplify the rules.

One Less Thing to Worry About

Hooray!

In 1998, the Oxford English Dictionary declared that the rule prohibiting split infinitives was never actually a valid rule of English. 

That's right, kids. It was moronery promulgated by those 18th-century dingi* who did all they could to try and make English smell like Latin. In this case, they used this travesty of linguistic logic: 

Infinitives in Latin are one word, therefore, we should never separate the elements of an English infinitive (to + verb) by more than a single space.

Ugh.

Oxford has spoken—ex cathedra et sine. That's as definitive as it gets.