... and be prepared patiently to debate...

[clauclauclaudia]

I hate the "no split infinitives" rule. It's no part of my internalized grammar, but every so often I encounter someone, usually a British someone, who abides by it, and it confuses me. I think they're tweaking the word order to topicalize or emphasize some part of the sentence, and I'm halfway to analyzing what that might be before I realize, oh, they're just doing things differently to avoid splitting infinitives.

I was very very sad when I realized that what I thought were some quirky turns of phrase by Douglas Adams were nothing more than him hewing to the "no split infinitives" rule. A little bit of imagined cleverness, gone.