> Because look, here's somebody who agrees with me that it's silly to avoid splitting an infinitive when the alternative is clunky and dumb sounding.

Do most people around here disagree with you about that? Shame on most people, then. It remains technically incorrect to do so, granted, but there are some times when it's better to be technically incorrect and get your point across than to be terminally stuffy and create a sentence that's hard to puzzle through. That's just common sense; we don't live in a country like France where it's actually illegal to misuse the language or anything. :-P

> But seriously, here's a list of common "non-errors" found in English. Some of them I know will be set a lot of our resident grammar-nazis on edge. But the ones that surprise me the most are the ones I never even supposed *were* errors. Such as "Lend vs Loan" and "Hopefully".

I came out of that page feeling as though the authour was a broken record. Nearly every one of those errors was responded to with "yeah, well, it's wrong, but people have been saying it like that for years." Despite Morris' passionate stance in favour of language being defined by common usage (which is a stance that strikes me as being the exact opposite of what I'm used to Morris saying), it's not a whole lot of an argument just to say "most people don't care that it's wrong." Unless your point is that people will not change what they're doing simply because some few people say that it's wrong according to rules for which there is no punishment for breaking. In which case, well, yeah. Don't stop the presses.

I have to take issue with a few of his examples, though. I don't see how the construction "who was it who said" is in any way absurd - it seems absolutely natural to me. And his "singular vs. plural" argument seems hopelessly tainted with Britishness - if you'll recall, the Brits and the Americans have been at odds for ages over whether collective nouns should be treated as singular or plural.

Altogether, I'd like to see more references on that page. He cites the OED a few times, but most of his examples are completely unsupported. It would be trivial for me to make a contradictory page that seems equally sensible. Not that I'm going to, mind - my point is simply that some student from WSU is not exactly an authouritative figure, and it would be foolish to accept his arguments out of hand. I come out of it with the feeling not that he's made some important and well-researched point, but rather that he got sick of his English professors marking his essays down over sticky little things like that, and made a "vent" page about it.

Oh, wait, am I one of those "grammar nazis" you were talking about? I must have missed my cue. I'll do better now:

ACHTUNG! HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT IT MAY BE PROPER TO SPLIT DAS INFINITIVE? YOU ARE GOING TO BE IN DAS TROUBLE MIT DAS GRAMMATIKPOLIZEI! DAS IST VERBOTEN!