MyChances.net

Essays should have consistent theses with relevant anecdotes, right?

Steven Pinker wrote an article in the New York Times yesterday about Chief Justice Roberts’s flub of Obama’s Oath of Office. Essentially, Chief Justice Roberts misspoke, saying “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully” instead of “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” as specified in the Constitution.

Pinker, a noted Harvard professor and the chair of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel, used this to lead into a discussion of split infinitives. His points are generally correct (or, rather, I agree with him). Distilled, his argument is that splitting infinitives has never been a grammatical problem in English, despite what some law journals may claim. While infinitives cannot be split in Latin (literally, you cannot split them, since they consist not of two words but of one), splitting them in English is easy, and allowed.

Both of these topics are interesting. However, what is odd is that he connects the two based on Roberts’s transposition of faithfully; Pinker infers that this was because Roberts wanted to move the “adverb ‘faithfully’ away from the verb.” That’s all well and good, but the Constitution’s version doesn’t split any infinitives! The adverb ‘faithfully’ in the predicate “… will faithfully execute” does not split an infinitive, but instead separates the auxiliary verb ‘will’ from the main verb ‘execute’. So he wanted to avoid a split auxiliary verb? OK, but if the split auxiliary verb is contentious, why not discuss that, instead of the much better-known disagreements over split infinitives?

In other words, Pinker wrote an interesting review of split infinitives that was incompletely relevant to the prompt at hand: the issue of a split auxiliary verb, which was hardly contentious.