It depends on whom you ask.
Some editors will still change “to boldly go where no man has gone before” to “to go boldly . . .”
But other pundits now consider the taboo against split infinitives all but passé.
The taboo was introduced by eighteenth and nineteenth-century grammarians for unknown reasons.
The phrase “to look a gift horse in the mouth” is as old as the fourth century A.D. and once had a literal meaning. Up to a certain number of years, a horse’s age can be determined by examining its teeth. To perform such an examination on a horse you’ve been given is looking a…
In the process of deduction, you derive conclusions from assumed statements by using the rules of logic, moving from the general to the specific. In induction, you make inferences from experiments or observations to build a general law, moving from the specific to the general.
The use of Ain’t as a substitute for am not or are not dates back to the reign of King Charles II, about 300 years. It is unclear how or why it became unacceptable in the English Language.
A median is the point that divides a series of numbers so that half are on one side, half on the other. In the series 1, 4, 8, 20, 24, 27, 42, the median is 20. The mean is the average of a series, found by dividing the sum by the number of elements. In…
Yes, Dr. Thomas Lushington (1590-1661), an English chaplain who liked his liquor. The City of Lushington, a London drinking club, may have borrowed its name from him. In the nineteenth century, the City of Lushington in turn became the source of the word lush, originally a slang term for beer and eventually another word for…
In the evening, citizens of the Roman Empire constructed their beds by placing straw into a cloth sack. The straw had to be emptied every night to dry; therefore, the beds had to be remade every night. This practice continued until the fifteenth century, in some countries, even later.