SIDEBAR @ "Story by Sentence"

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Cyclefrance

Interesting stuff, Maggie, but I am sure the split came sometime around the infinitive. After that it was (Eng) certainly going to be/ (Am) going to certainly be downhill all the way...!

Resisting split infinitives comes from obsessing about how directly English translates into Latin. As big a fan as I am of prescriptive grammar, ordinarily infinitive splitting is not something up with which I will not put.

It's hardly worth worrying about at this point, given some of the larger battles in progress; a pecadillo in the face of the high crimes and misdemenors currently before us. But in your example, the actual transgression isn't the split infinitive. It's the misplaced modifier. That it's misplaced into the middle of the prepositional phrase just compounds the crime.