Adverbs should go where they sound most natural, often immediately after the to: to boldly go, to personally guarantee. Stubbornly to resist splitting infinitives can sound awkward or, worse, ambiguous: "He offered personally to guarantee the loan that the Clintons needed to buy their house" makes it unclear whether the offer, or the guarantee, was personal. 1 To infinitive and beyond Geoffrey K Pullum, a scarily erudite linguistics professor – and, unless this is an internet hoax, keyboard player in the 1960s with Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band – calls them "zombie rules: though dead, they shamble mindlessly on … " And none more so than the one that says the particle to and the infinitive form of the verb should not be separated, as in Star Trek's eloquent mission statement "to boldly go where no man has gone before".
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