What’s wrong with splitting the infinite? I ask you. But there’s no answer required because I no longer care. I quit worrying about it. I used to quietly hate them vs. I quietly used to hate them. Give-me-a-break! The rule comes all the way from Latin days, so they say, but I say we’ve come a long way since those days and them rules. Now I’m onto something else: what caused the Mayan’s to vanish? Finally something worth staying up at night to secretly figure out. Or rather, worth staying up at night secretly to figure out. No, no more of that. Thank you Lord. Mil Gracias.
About the Mayans: those temple building, great thinking, chocolate loving astronomers that built cities like Chichen Itza and developed the only written script in Mesoamerica, vanished—poof. A great civilization came to an end—even before the Spanish could lend a hand and expedite the vanishing. Only nobody knows why. Lots of theories but no real answers. Some say it was war, others blame a century of drought, and still others blame a collapsing trade route with subsequent invasions. Hard to believe that of all the theories, the main one is climate change. Here we go again, thinks I. (Or is it me doing the thinking? Another rule I have to check on—and a preposition at the end of the sentence?)
My theory of Mayan demise is that, like some of us, they got bogged down with language, not climate change. Simple: there were no tricky VW’s, no billion plus fossil-fuel burning Chinamen, no concept of energy footprint, nothing. Also, nobody invaded them, the trade routes were not interrupted that I can tell, which leaves language. Granted, their rules probably did not come from Latin, so, hypothetically, they could have been worse. Also, their empire was vast, so there was lots of room for improvement, but did they manage to improve? I say no, they certainly most probably didn’t. Somewhere between split infinitives, ill-timed propositions, and dangling participles, they were unable to cope, causing their autocracy really to collapse. Dios mio!