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<DIV><STRONG><FONT size=2>January 22, 2009<BR>Op-Ed Contributor New York
Times</FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT size=2><BR></FONT><FONT size=6>Oaf of
Office</FONT></STRONG></DIV><STRONG><FONT size=2><FONT size=5>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT><BR>By STEVEN PINKER</DIV>
<DIV></FONT><BR><FONT size=3>IN 1969, Neil Armstrong appeared to have omitted an
indefinite article as he <BR>stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled
over the difference <BR>between "man" and "mankind." In 1980, Jimmy Carter,
accepting his party's <BR>nomination, paid homage to a former vice president he
called Hubert Horatio <BR>Hornblower. A year later, Diana Spencer reversed the
first two names of her <BR>betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince
Charles Philip supposedly <BR>later joked, actually married his
father.<BR><BR>On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of
Fame when <BR>he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without
notes. <BR>Instead of having Barack Obama "solemnly swear that I will faithfully
<BR>execute the office of president of the United States," Chief Justice Roberts
<BR>had him "solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the
<BR>United States faithfully." When Mr. Obama paused after "execute," the chief
<BR>justice prompted him to continue with "faithfully the office of president of
<BR>the United States." (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the
<BR>chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)<BR><BR>How could
a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, <BR>among the
best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and <BR>connoisseurs
of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious <BR>retaliation for
Senator Obama's vote against the chief justice's <BR>confirmation in 2005. But a
simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb <BR>in the passage is blowback
from Chief Justice Roberts's habit of grammatical <BR>niggling.<BR><BR>Language
pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis <BR>in logic
or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and <BR>that
have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they
<BR>refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by
<BR>insecure writers.<BR><BR>Among these fetishes is the prohibition against
"split verbs," in which an <BR>adverb comes between an infinitive marker like
"to," or an auxiliary like <BR>"will," and the main verb of the sentence.
According to this superstition, <BR>Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when
he declared that the five-year <BR>mission of the starship Enterprise was "to
boldly go where no man has gone <BR>before"; it should have been "to go boldly."
Likewise, Dolly Parton should <BR>not have declared that "I will always love
you" but "I always will love you" <BR>or "I will love you always."<BR><BR>Any
speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense <BR>that
these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. <BR>The
myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in <BR>which
it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a <BR>single
word, like dicere, "to say." But in English, infinitives like "to go" <BR>and
future-tense forms like "will go" are two words, not one, and there is <BR>not
the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between
<BR>them.<BR><BR>Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend,
it found its <BR>way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the
arbiter of usage <BR>for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of
the manual, has <BR>found that many lawyers have "internalized the bogus rule so
that they <BR>actually believe that a split verb should be avoided," adding,
"The Invasion <BR>of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no
longer <BR>distinguish alien speech from native speech."<BR><BR>In his legal
opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to <BR>conform to his
notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the "ain't" <BR>from Bob Dylan's
line "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose." <BR>On Tuesday his
inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict <BR>constructionism and
unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the <BR>adverb "faithfully" away
from the verb.<BR><BR>President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in
his speeches and <BR>writings, smiled at the chief justice's hypercorrection,
then gamely <BR>repeated it. Let's hope that during the next four years he will
always <BR>challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new
directions.<BR></FONT><BR>Steven Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard and
the chairman of the <BR>usage panel of The American Heritage
Dictionary.<BR></DIV></FONT></STRONG></BODY></HTML>