Sir, - Your correspondent, Cathal Donovan, registers suffering at the sight of split infinitives (July 25th). Yet the practice is not necessarily sinful, as Fowler demonstrates in more than 2 1/2 pages on the subject in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. Certainly. avoidance can at times seem pretentious and contrived.
George Bernard Shaw had no such inhibitions when writing to the editor of a newspaper whose comments irritated him: "There is a busybody on your staff who constantly criticises me for splitting my infinitives. I demand the immediate dismissal of this pedant. Whether you ask him to go quickly, quickly to go, or to quickly go is irrelevant. The important thing is that he should go at once."
Deserving more attention, it seems to me, are the typos, lapses in syntax and spelling and elementary grammatical gaffes which pollute the pages of our newspapers and all kinds of, supposedly, serious documentation! These are now spreading, as John Boland pointed out in a recent "Bookworm column, to book publishing.
Is it reasonable to keep blaming the computer? The IBM chief, Louis Gerstner, perhaps supplied the answer when speaking on the need for educated workers: "We can teach them what they need to run a machine. What is killing us is having to teach them to read, to compute. . . and to think."
How about reviving that quaint anachronism, the proof reader?
Surely. a remedy to seriously consider. - Yours, etc.,
Mount Merrion Avenue,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.