One is former Air Force gunner Mel Jenner, now 102. Follow this link to read the story. We transcribe these stories every day, and it’s amazing how little they have forgotten. This next paragraph from The Washington Post Opinion illustrates what we hear every day. They remember the names, they remember the faces, they remember their laugh, where they were from, where they were heading, the shock of realizing they weren’t coming back. I hope you can follow the link and read the article.

Jenner, as photojournalist David Burnett recounts, is not thinking about the war in the abstract. He is thinking about his best friend, Oscar McClure, then a young gunner as well, and watching as his friend waved his last goodbye from a neighboring plane. Far away from the speeches this week, that’s what D-Day still means to those who were there.

Mel Jenner, a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps and the Air Force, at his home in Orlando in March. (David Burnett/Contact Press Images)

Opinion

The B-17 blew apart in an instant. The memory has burned for 80 years.

For waist gunner Mel Jenner, a friend’s farewell in the skies over occupied France has echoed since 1944.

By David Burnett

June 3, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

You’ve probably heard about Grammarly – the Word-integrated tool that allows you to check for spelling and grammar mistakes. However, you might not be familiar with their blog yet. That’s where this article came from.

There are a few “rules” of grammar that aren’t actually rules or, at any rate, rules that people like grammarians and linguists can agree on. These scenarios show that the standards and norms around language can be inconsistent and often confusing.

One classic example of these non-rule rules is the common advice that infinitives shouldn’t be split—meaning no words should come between the to preceding an infinitive verb and the verb itself. In fact, it’s now widely acknowledged that there’s nothing grammatically incorrect about a split infinitive. Let’s not be afraid to boldly go where many have been told not to go before.

What is a split infinitive?

An infinitive is the root form of a verb, which is the way it appears without any of the changes that it can make to show properties (such as voice, mood, tense, person, and number). It’s also the form of a verb that can appear after the word to: to be, to have.

When we refer to an infinitive as being “split,” we mean that an adverb or adverb phrase is placed between the to and the principal verb in a sentence, as in these examples:

She seems to often be up and about early in the morning.

Wen decided to gradually decrease the amount of time they spent on their phone every day.

Is it OK to use split infinitives?

The short answer to the question of whether it’s OK to use split infinitives is yes. Most usage experts today agree that there is no grammatical objection to the split infinitive and that there are quite a few circumstances in which splitting an infinitive can be preferable to leaving it intact.

Reasons to split an infinitive

Meaning

It’s generally preferable to place an adverb as close as possible to the verb it is modifying, and sometimes misplacing it can really change the meaning of a sentence. Compare the following two examples—the first has the infinitive split by the adverb always, and the second is rewritten in a way that doesn’t split the infinitive:

I was taught to always clean up after myself.

I was taught always to clean up after myself.

In the second sentence, the infinitive to clean up is not split. However, the placement of always after the verb phrase was taught makes the meaning ambiguous—the sentence could be read as saying that the teaching always happened rather than that the lesson was to always clean up.

There are certain constructions whose meanings are absolutely reliant on an infinitive being split. Consider this sentence:

The company had intended to more than double its output that quarter.

It couldn’t be rewritten as “The company had intended more than to double its output” or as “The company had intended to double more than its output”—neither of those versions makes any sense.

Natural rhythm and emphasis

Sometimes, even when a sentence could be rewritten to avoid splitting an infinitive without its meaning being obscured, the result sounds awkward, unnatural, or like the emphasis is in the wrong place. In those cases, it generally makes sense to split the infinitive rather than sacrifice the gracefulness of your language. Here are some examples of sentences that would lose some naturalness or emphasis without their split infinitives. Try to reorganize them with the infinitive unsplit and see if you agree.

I want to really emphasize the importance of the workshop tomorrow.

Paz likes to gradually come to consciousness in the morning rather than being abruptly woken up.

We choose to not mow the lawn in order to attract pollinators.

When not to split an infinitive

Because so many readers, educators, and others still object to split infinitives and find them annoying, it may make sense to avoid them in cases where you don’t have to sacrifice any clarity or elegance to do so. Here are some examples of sentences that can be painlessly rewritten to avoid the split infinitive, with examples of how to do that:

Split: The women proceeded to briefly describe what they’d seen in the city.

Not split: The women proceeded to describe what they’d seen in the city.

Split: I’d love to completely go over the text with you tomorrow.

Not split: I’d love to go over the text with you completely tomorrow.

Just keep in mind that you don’t have to spoil a natural rhythm or muddy your meaning just to appease the anti-splitters.

Examples of split infinitives from pop culture and literature

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before. —Star Trek

For me I’m sworn to never trust a man— / At least with letters. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

But still, the policy of the army at that time was not to send—was specifically to not send—women into combat roles —NPR

Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still. —Lord Byron, “Love and Death”

I knocked gently and rang as quietly as possible, for I feared to disturb Lucy or her mother, and hoped to only bring a servant to the door. —Bram Stoker, Dracula

Split infinitive FAQs

What is an infinitive?

An infinitive is the most basic form of a verb, which is the way it appears without any of the changes that it can make to show properties. It’s also the form of a verb that can appear after the word to.

What is a split infinitive?

A split infinitive is an infinitive that has an adverb or adverb phrase appearing between the to and the principal verb.

Is the use of split infinitives grammatically incorrect?

Though many people have been taught that using a split infinitive is grammatically incorrect, that idea has little basis in historical usage guides, and most usage experts today agree that there is no grammatical objection to the practice. Often, splitting an infinitive is clearer or more graceful than not splitting it.

By Geoff Nunberg

Leigh Wells/Ikon Images/Getty Images

Are people starting sentences with “so” more frequently than ever or are we just noticing it more?

To listen to the media tell it, “so” is busting out all over — or at least at the beginning of a sentence. New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas calls “so” the new “um” and “like”; others call it a plague and a fad.

It’s like a lot of other grammatical fixations: Not everybody cares about it, but the ones who do care care a whole lot. When NPR’s Weekend Edition asked listeners last year to pick the most-misused word or phrase in the language, that sentence-initial “so” came in in second place, right behind “between you and I” and ahead of venerable bugbears like misusing “literally” and confusing “who” and “whom.” That’s a meteoric rise for a peeve that wasn’t even on the radar a decade ago.

NPR itself has been singled out for overuse of “so” by both interviewees and hosts. That prompted the NPR head of standards and practices to calculate how many times the hosts and reporters on the major NPR news programs had started sentences with “so” in a single week in August of 2014. When the total came to 237, he urged them to look for alternatives.

But not so fast. When you break that weekly figure down, it only comes to one sentence beginning with “so” every eight or 10 minutes. That isn’t actually very many, particularly when you’re running a lot of interviews. After all, “so” is a conversational workhorse. It announces a new topic, it connects causes to results, it sets up a joke. “So, what’s it like being Justin Bieber?” “So, do the low interest rates help farmers?” “So three gastroenterologists walk into a bar.”

Starting sentences with “so” isn’t a trend or a thing. However it may strike you, people aren’t doing it any more frequently than they were 50 or 100 years ago. The only difference is that back then nobody had much of a problem with it. When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins sat down with him to go over the manuscript of The Great Gatsby, he didn’t say: “Scott — this last line. ‘So, we beat on, boats against the current’ etc. etc.? I think we need to go with ‘thus.’ “

So, why the recent hue and cry about those sentences beginning with “so”? In part, you could blame the quirk of perception I think of as the Andy Rooney effect, where you suddenly become keenly aware of a common word that’s always been part of the conversational wallpaper. Somebody says, “Have you noticed how everybody’s saying ‘OK’ before they hang up the phone?” and all at once the word starts jumping out at you, even though people have been using it that way forever.

Many of the complaints about sentences beginning with “so” are triggered by a specific use of the word that’s genuinely new. It’s the “so” that you hear from people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the backstory. I go to the Apple Store and ask the guy at the Genius Bar why my laptop is running slow. He starts by saying, “So, Macs have two kinds of disk permissions …” If that “so” were a chapter title in a Victorian novel, it would read, “In which it is explained what the reader must know before his question can be given a proper answer.”

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The Curious Listener: ‘So,’ Is This A Fad?

Scientists have been using that backstory “so” among themselves since the 1980s, but its recent spread is probably due to the tech boom. In his 2001 book The New New Thing, Michael Lewis noted that programmers always started their answers with “so.” That’s around the time when I first heard it, working at a Silicon Valley research center. Mark Zuckerberg answers questions with “so” all the time: “So, it comes down to the economics …” “So one of the services that the government wanted to include …” But by now that backstory “so” is endemic among members of the explaining classes — the analysts, scientists and policy wonks who populate the Rolodexes of CNBC and The PBS NewsHour.

To my ear, that backstory “so” is merely a little geeky, but it rouses some critics to keening indignation. A BBC host says speakers use it to sound important and intellectual. A columnist at Fast Company warns that it undermines your credibility. A psychologist writes that it’s a weasel word that people use to avoid giving a straight answer.

That’s a lot to lay on the back of a little blue-collar conjunction like “so.” But that backstory “so” can stand in for people’s impatience with the experts who use it. When you hear a labor economist or computer scientist begin an answer with “so,” they’re usually telling us that things are more complicated than we thought, and maybe more complicated than we really want to know. That may be why they were called in in the first place, but as Walter Lippmann once said, the facts exceed our curiosity.

That backstory “so” puts me on guard, too, even when I hear it coming out of my own mouth. Usually it just introduces some background qualification that the question calls out for, as in, “So … German isn’t actually a romance language.” But sometimes it announces some nugget of specialized linguistic knowledge that I feel the need to share. If that “so” were a chapter title in a Victorian novel, it would read, “In which the reader is asked, ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ “

Section 6.52 in the Spotlight

The seventeenth edition of CMOS was the first edition to rule explicitly on whether “too” in the adverbial sense of “also” should be set off by commas. The rule applies also to “either,” which as an adverb can play a similar role in a sentence or clause.

The short answer is that commas are unnecessary but occasionally helpful for emphasis or clarity. We can find out what this means in practice—and why having a rigid rule isn’t a good idea—by starting with a simple example.

The first edition of the Manual, published in 1906, may not have addressed “too” or “either” by name, but it did have something to say about such words. Paragraph 132 ended with a suggestion that commas should not be used “ordinarily with such terms as ‘perhaps,’ ‘also,’ ‘likewise,’ etc.”—and offered a few examples in support of this.

Here’s the last one: “He was a scholar and a sportsman too.” Note the absence of any comma. And though it wasn’t featured in the examples, the word “either” would play the same role in such a sentence rewritten in the negative: “He wasn’t a scholar or a sportsman either.”

Whatever else you might think of that ancient example from the first edition, it does provide the basis for a rule—or in this case a sort of nonrule.

What Was That Rule Again?

Some people have tried to argue that whether to set off “too” (or “either”) depends on its relationship to the words in the sentence. According to this argument, a comma would be required in our original example if “too” applied to “sportsman” but not if it applied to the subject “He” (or to the sentence as a whole).

Or is it the other way around?

That’s a serious question, because such a rule would require an agreement between writers and readers on precisely how to interpret the presence or absence of a comma.

Let’s say there is such an agreement. Then the following sentence—with a comma before “too”—would mean that the subject “She” (let’s bring the answer into the twenty-first century) is not only a scholar but also an athlete, with the emphasis on “athlete”:

She is a scholar and an athlete, too.

Applying the same logic, removing the comma would alter the meaning. Without the comma, some previously mentioned other person or persons are scholars and athletes, and “She,” like that person or those people, is also a scholar and an athlete, with the emphasis on “She”:

She is a scholar and an athlete too.

You could extend this logic to “either” by rewriting the sentence in the negative: “She wasn’t a scholar or an athlete either.” That would put the emphasis on “She”; adding a comma would move the emphasis to “athlete”: “She wasn’t a scholar or an athlete, either.”

Makes sense, right? Yes, maybe—except there is no such agreement.

Context Is Everything

When it comes to making meaning, context is almost always more important than commas. This is particularly true with “too” and “either.” If your sentence is not entirely clear from context alone, revise until it is.

In the following example, it’s clear from context that “too” refers to “athlete”:

Maria’s academic achievements are well known, but she also excelled at track and field. Maria was a scholar and an athlete too.

When it comes to making meaning, context is almost always more important than commas.

But in this example of dialogue, the context makes it clear that “too” refers back to “Maria”:

“All my eleven kids got perfect grades while excelling at sports.”

“Maria was a scholar and an athlete too,” I reminded her, making a plug for my daughter.

In either case, a comma would have made no appreciable difference to the meaning, which is predetermined in both examples by the context.* (Again, you can make the examples negative to test “either.”)

Italics and Word Order

Where emphasis is important, and you don’t want to leave it to context alone, one option is to apply italics. Italics will help readers decode the intended meaning, or at least the intended emphasis. Add commas to the following examples if you like, but they won’t change the meaning of either version.

Maria was a scholar and an athlete too.

Maria was a scholar and an athlete too.

Another option that works well with “too” (but rarely with “either”) is to shift the placement of the adverb. In the following example, it is obvious that “too” applies to Maria:

Maria too was a scholar and an athlete.

Commas lend an additional dimension to this sentence:

Maria, too, was a scholar and an athlete.

Those commas, by drawing attention to the word “too,” emphasize the rhetorical shift implied by that word. Especially when “too” occurs midsentence, such commas may add a bit of clarity also.

Summing It Up

Some writers follow a simple rule: use commas with “too” and “either.” And because such commas don’t have the power to determine the intended meaning all by themselves, this approach is fine. Editors working with authors whose style depends on frequent, well-placed commas (in what is sometimes called close rather than open punctuation) should query before simply removing them.

But in general, Chicago favors a relatively spare, open approach to commas, omitting many commas that aren’t necessary for comprehension—including commas with “too” and “either.”

If that’s you too, then you won’t need those commas either.

In sum, the key to deciding when to use commas with “too” and “either”—and the spirit of the rule in section 6.52—is to leave them out by default. Then add them only rarely if at all—and only where a bit of extra emphasis or clarity seems warranted.

* It may go without saying, but the functionally similar word “also” is almost never set off by commas: “She was a scholar and an athlete also.” This is perhaps the strongest argument for not requiring commas with “too” and “either.”

What’s the Big Deal About Ain’t? Is It Really “Bad English”?

Why does the word “ain’t” spark so much controversy? Is it improper English? Does it even qualify as a real word? And what exactly does it stand for?

Let’s get to it!

What Does Ain’t Stand For?

Ain’t is a contraction that can replace phrases like am not, are not, and is not. But its uses don’t stop there—it also stands in for have not, has not, do not, does not, and did not. It’s incredibly versatile, serving as a one-size-fits-all way to express negation in different contexts.

The most widely accepted theory is that “ain’t” originated from the contraction “amn’t,” which stands for “am not.” This form of contraction was once common in English and is still used in some dialects, particularly in Ireland and Scotland. Over time, “amn’t” began to shift in pronunciation, eventually becoming “ain’t.”

Is Ain’t a Legitimate Word?

Without a doubt, ain’t is a real word. However, in contemporary usage, it’s considered nonstandard. At worst, it’s criticized as a marker of “ignorance” or “low-class” speech. At best, it’s something that’s typically avoided in formal writing.

But it wasn’t always frowned upon. Historically, ain’t (and its variations like an’t) was used by upper-class characters in literature, including those from the Victorian era. Yes, ain’t was once perfectly acceptable in the casual language of the social elite!

Over time, though, ain’t became associated with lower-class speech, particularly in the works of authors like Charles Dickens. This shift led to ain’t being considered a vulgarism that polite society should avoid. Interestingly, this aversion may explain why we now use the slightly ungrammatical phrase aren’t I? in questions.

Ain’t It Interesting?

While ain’t is often criticized, we regularly use many other contractions involving “not” in English. Some of them have already popped up in this discussion—did you catch them?

There’s isn’t, didn’t, wasn’t, and aren’t. Then there’s can’t, won’t, and wouldn’t. We also use haven’t, hasn’t, weren’t, shouldn’t, and don’t. At one time, English speakers even used hain’t for has not and have not, similar to ain’t. There was also bain’t, another contraction akin to ain’t, derived from be(en) not.

How Can You Use Ain’t?

Despite being seen as improper by many, ain’t is a normal and valid part of various English dialects, including Black English (AAVE). It’s important to remember that criticizing someone’s use of ain’t as “wrong” can carry significant social and cultural weight.

Here are a few examples of ain’t as a substitute for am/are/is not:

• I ain’t going to the party tonight.

• They ain’t coming over for dinner anymore.

• He ain’t the one who surprised you with flowers.

And here’s how ain’t functions as a replacement for have/has/do/does/did not:

• We ain’t got any more milk in the fridge.

• They ain’t get to see the movie.

• She ain’t need that ride anymore.

Outside of specific dialects, ain’t also appears in numerous popular expressions and titles. These sayings are hard to imagine without ain’t—try swapping it out for a more formal equivalent and see if they still have the same punch:

1. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

2. “You ain’t seen nothing yet”

3. “It ain’t over till it’s over”

4. “Ain’t nobody got time for that” (my personal favorite)

5. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”