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Re: Pressing the House of Commons Swiftly
A British magazine journalist wrote: Avoidance of delay was the big reason why the government this week pressed the House of Commons swiftly to overturn a House of Lord's plan... ( Extra emphasis from the post)
As the linguist, Geoffrey K. Pullum, points out, "It was about swift overturning, not swift pressing."
He continues, "The adverb has been pointlessly positioned where it can most naturally be understood as modifying the wrong verb.
"Why this stylistic self-sabotage? Because of a totally unjustified belief, due to 18th and 19th century pontifications aided and abetted by 20th-century dimwits, that it is some kind of sin to place a modifier immediately before the verb of a to-infinitival complement."
So much damage is done by English teachers with no linguistics training spouting 19th century mistaken notions about English grammar: this particular kind of "split infinite," the uses of "whom" (I grew up in a family where we only used it occasionally and only after prepositions. We probably sounded weird to everyone else by using it that much!), using "I shall" to the exclusion of "I will" (my parents suffered through that nonsense in school), and never using "prepositions" to end a sentence (Folks, if it's the last element in the sentence, it ain't a preposition in the Latin sense and no matter what somebody in the 18th century thought, you can't squeeze English into Latin grammar!).
A British magazine journalist wrote: Avoidance of delay was the big reason why the government this week pressed the House of Commons swiftly to overturn a House of Lord's plan... ( Extra emphasis from the post)
As the linguist, Geoffrey K. Pullum, points out, "It was about swift overturning, not swift pressing."
He continues, "The adverb has been pointlessly positioned where it can most naturally be understood as modifying the wrong verb.
"Why this stylistic self-sabotage? Because of a totally unjustified belief, due to 18th and 19th century pontifications aided and abetted by 20th-century dimwits, that it is some kind of sin to place a modifier immediately before the verb of a to-infinitival complement."
So much damage is done by English teachers with no linguistics training spouting 19th century mistaken notions about English grammar: this particular kind of "split infinite," the uses of "whom" (I grew up in a family where we only used it occasionally and only after prepositions. We probably sounded weird to everyone else by using it that much!), using "I shall" to the exclusion of "I will" (my parents suffered through that nonsense in school), and never using "prepositions" to end a sentence (Folks, if it's the last element in the sentence, it ain't a preposition in the Latin sense and no matter what somebody in the 18th century thought, you can't squeeze English into Latin grammar!).