front of the verb. In Latin, however, infinitive verb phrases are single words, not
two words. We can use Spanish to illustrate this principle because Spanish is a
Latin-based language. In Spanish, the infinitive verb phraseto speakishablar,
one word. It is not possible to split the infinitive, and any attempt to do so would
be both impossible and ridiculous. But because English forms the infinitive
verb phrase using two words, it is possible to split the infinitive, and, indeed,
speakers and writers do so all the time. In claiming that the infinitive in English
should not be split, Lowth and his often witless adherents were trying to force
English to fit the structure and grammar of Latin.
Language scholars during this time suffered from a fundamental confusion
that had its roots in the notion of linguistic decay first formulated by the Greeks.
They noted that well-educated people wrote and spoke good Latin; those who
were not so well educated, on the other hand, made mistakes. These scholars
did not recognize that reproducing a dead language is an academic exercise,
and they applied their observation to modern languages. In this view, those
without education and culture corrupt the language with their deviations from
the prescribed norm. Accordingly, the discourse forms of books and up-
per-class conversation represented an older and purer level of language from
which the speech of the common people had degenerated.
The Age of Reason
The 19thcentury—The Age of Reason—witnessed fundamental shifts in so-
ciety that inevitably affected grammar study. Although industrialization is of-
ten cited as the most significant social change during this century, equally
important was the population explosion in Europe and the United States that
industrialization set off.
As Greenword, Seshadri, and Vandenbroucke (2002) indicated, industrial-
ization had the greatest influence on poor farmers. In 1800, 80% of Americans
lived on farms. During the 1850s alone, approximately 23% of American males
between the ages of 20 and 30 migrated to cities to work in factories (Ferrie,
1999). The material improvement was modest, but it was enough to trigger a
population explosion. Greenword et al., for example, noted that “the baby
boom [of the 19thcentury] is explained by an atypical burst of technological
progress in the household sector that ... lowered the cost of having children” (p.
1). Census data reflect the extent of the baby boom. The National Center for Ed-
ucation Statistics (1993) reported that the U.S. population in 1800 was 5.3 mil-
lion; by 1850 it was 23 million, of which only about 4 million was the result of
immigration. England experienced similar growth. Aldrich (1999) reported
that the population of England and Wales doubled between 1800 and 1850.
12 CHAPTER 1