Al, in a gesture of poetic irony, took a song that bespoke society's decline in love and respect, turned it on its head and suited it in an armour sturdy enough to take on the almost-as-crucial decline of the English language.
Unfortunately, a meddlesome Third Group of people seemed to notice that Al, in his song, made a grammatical mistake of his own. This group singled out the error over and above all of the critical truths he very humorously conveyed.
What was his error? In one of the last lines, he split an infinitive.
Part One: It's quite all right to split an infinitive
Weird Al's sacrilegious line reads, "Try your best to not drool." Are you cringing yet? Because, according to a rule somewhere, you should be.
What's a split infinitive?
You split an infinitive whenever you slot an adverb between the words 'to' and 'be', or 'to' and 'go', or 'to' and whatever.
The line, "To boldly go where no man has gone before," is a famous example.
What's an adverb?
Adverbs describe verbs or adjectives. 'Run' is a verb; 'run slowly' is a verb plus an adverb. 'Go' is a verb, and 'to go' is also a verb, but it's called an infinitive.
'To boldly go' is a half infinitive, then an adverb, and then another half infinitive. Evidently you're not meant to break infinitives in half (split them).
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Personally, I, if at all possible, prefer to soundly reason than to blindly follow.
The commandment that "thou'st an infinitive shall 't be split, else thy head," comes from Latin, from which much of English grammar was derived.
In Latin, splitting an infinitive would render the sentence useless. You couldn't do it and still make sense.
But - and here's where the sound reasoning kicks in - we don't speak Latin.
More sound reasoning:
Language is a road, not a destination, and there's no point having roads if you've got nowhere to drive. It's the meaning that's important, not the density of your silly infinitive. Just look at him! (Above)
My understanding is that language is how we communicate, not what we communicate.
Third Group's counterexample to sound reasoning:
Beyond pretending that English is Latin, in most cases, splitting an infinitive will make your sentence sound awkward. There's normally a better way to write the sentence than to split the infinitive. So, basically, the meaning of your sentence is usually conveyed better with the infinitive left whole.
What this is really saying, though, is that rules exist for a reason. Full stops, for one, separate sentences. Stop signs keep people from crashing. Un-split infinitives, well, they help keep things sounding nice.
The Third Group, however, rant about Weird Al's split infinitive with none of this reasoning in mind. Their argument goes as follows:
"He split an infinitive!"
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"Burn him!"
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Right. Anyway, in the song in question, Weird Al achieves two important things by splitting an infinitive: humour and rhythm. These things are important because Weird Al is trying to a) be funny, and b) write a song. Funny things need humour and songs need rhythm. What they don't need are roads with dead ends.
The last three lines of the final chorus, with the emphasised words in bold, read like this:
Go back to pre-school
Get out of the gene pool
Try your best to not drool
A little bit rude, right? That was intentional. The joke wouldn't have been effective had the infinitive not been split and the line read instead, "Try your best not to drool," (preserving the sacred infinitive).
This is because the emphasis on 'not' (rather than 'to') is what communicates the idea that not drooling is an exception to the norm. The only other way that the humour would have remained intact would've been to, I guess, rewrite the entire line and break the rhyme, but that would compromise the rhythm, and in turn the humour... so, actually, no.
Splitting the infinitive made that third line incredibly effective because it achieved exactly what Al had intended.
It should be known: grammar rules work most of the time because, most of the time, following them is the best way to achieve the exact form of communication you intend. For instance, I have followed a heck of a load of grammar rules in writing this blog post.
But the rules do not always help. Take the word 'silence', for example. By itself, 'silence' is just a word; yet, you can find it in many a novel, alone, by itself, acting as an entire sentence. Gasp? Not yet.
The word tells you one thing: that there was silence, but the word being by itself can show you other things, like suspense, tension, fear, and uncertainty. Had the sentence read like a sentence, "There was silence," then the emotions might not have been effectively conveyed.
The emotional value of the sentence is strengthened due to its simplicity (one word); and, if this is what the author intended, then writing "silence" as a sentence was entirely justified.
In saying that, a person should understand a rule before he dares to break it. He should know the rules by heart before he toys with them, otherwise it could very well be his head.
In a way, the Third Group is right. They know that you need a rule book before you can drive, but they're forgetting that no one drives without first having somewhere to go. And for that, you need a brain, too.
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