The idea that the split infinitive is bad comes from a fixation in the 18th century that Latin (long dead even at that time) was a somehow superior language. Yo

The idea that the split infinitive is bad comes from a fixation in the 18th century that Latin (long dead even at that time) was a somehow superior language. You can't split infinitives in Latin (or most of its descendents). "To sleep" in Latin is dormire. That includes the concept of "to", so there's no way to say "to soundly sleep". You'd have to put it as "to sleep soundly," and so automatically, that's the "correct" form in English, too. English is an inferior language to Latin, right? Same story with ending a sentence with a preposition, dangling participles, and other taboos: there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but you couldn't or didn't do it in Latin. Ergo, it's bad. The real fault is the attempt to make functional language into hard science. It's not. Language was not invented by god. It's a human construct, and using it is nearly an art. Good advice? Useful. Sure, don't over-explain. But don't bother getting into an argument with someone about whether a word in a sentence was truly necessary. People who do those kind of things have lost perspective.