Adverbs Inside Infinitives

I’ve written about this before, but hey, I have a comic!

Everybody knows about the TV show (or was it a movie?) that started with something about “to boldly go where…” and you probably had an English teacher (if you’re old enough) who said not to do that, you should say “boldly to go…” or maybe “to go boldly.” You might remember that I said that this rule was promulgated by Latinists who wanted English to be more like Latin. Baloney! Put those adverbs right there in the middle of the verb! (If you’re going to use an adverb, anyway. Try your sentence with a better verb and no adverb.)

So here’s the comic. See the second cell:

Thank you, Scott. I’ve been hanging onto this comic since 2014 and only now got around to finally using it. Shame on me.

By the way, at the top of that second cell, he writes, “have only noticed…” a similar construction.