Infinitive (November)

Try to november the kind of remember when books were closed now, geography and history put away in the desk, as friends had in store escapes to rivers or clubs in jasmine lanes where music was cheap but rich as paintings of gold imaginings the eye had never seen nor the mind concluded with; the kind of remember with one especially, your shared mayhem of rave, your overthrow of appearance, now a new warmth is in the bloodstream, better than a drug, more lasting than any wine, whom you go with along familiar streets you’d never noticed like that before.

Infinitive (February)

‘To deliberately split the infinitive’ is, it may be said, no different from ‘deliberately to split the infinitive’ or ‘to split the infinitive deliberately’. Zealots for Fowler, keen to divide the world into splitters and non-splitters, mayn’t have read the original scripture, which reasons subtly when to unsafely split the infinitive. Five closely argued columns circle around this sentence: “We maintain, however, that a real s.i., though not desirable in itself, is preferable to either of two things, to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality.” To usefully spend February refreshing our knowledge of usage is one of life’s minor pleasures.