This season I discovered a new favorite Christmas hymn-- a melancholy number by Christina Rossetti. The first verse (also the gloomiest) particularly won me over:
In the bleak mid-winter frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter, long ago.
I sang this song with my high school choir in 1997.
ReplyDeleteSweetie, you know grammarians (of the late 18th-century, I think) introduced the prohibition of split infinitives to make English as Latinate as possible-- in Latin, infinitives are always a single word. The same goes for ending a sentence with a preposition: while Latin is a synthetic (rather than analytic) language-- meaning that word order in Latin doesn't determine syntax-- a preposition can't conclude a sentence because it must be followed by its object. When was the last time you gave a flying fuck about maintaining the Latinate qualities of English? I mean really!? xo
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