[nitpick]
It’s spelled athy.
[/nitpick]
uhh…what? how the hell is one an answer to the other? Because these people have made me paranoid about my spelling and grammer, they tend to correct spelling and grammar? please, explain
Heh, my intent really was to ask a question, not to pick nits or show off terminology or anything. When Jodi said it wasn’t an infinitive, I was very surprised at first, but then, after thinking about it, decided she was right. But I wanted to make sure I understood her correctly.
You have it the other way around. Because they hassle you about your spelling, you end up habitually running spellcheck to avoid the hassle. Mission accomplished in the nitpickers’ eyes.
I don’t believe “have to” is a modal auxiliary but yes, “correct” is a bare infinitive. My point is that the stucture is “[have to] correct” not “[have] to correct,” as is demonstrated by the fact that “have to” (not merely have) conveys the necessary meaning of “must” or “to be required”. That is also reflected when the bare infinitive is dropped but the “must” meaning is retained:
“Do you have to go now?”
“No, I don’t have to.”
IOW, you don’t “split the infinitive” by separating “to” and the verb in such constructions as “going to [verb]” or “have to [verb]” “ought to [verb]” (“ought” being a true modal auxiliary) because the “to” goes with “going”, “have,” or “ought,” not with whatever the second verb is. “We are going to quickly leave” may not be the world’s most elegant sentence, but that is splits the infinitive is not a valid objection to it.
Now, shall we argue about modal auxiliaries? 
Sure, might as well.
Why isn’t “have to” one? It seems directly analogous to “ought to”, or, for that matter, “must”.
People once believed that splitting the infinitive might cause a chain reaction, igniting the academic atmosphere and ultimately destroying the world of language.
Nevertheless, grammarians secretly split an infinitive in a barren wasteland, despite uncertainty and possible peril. When they saw that the world did not in fact end, it ushered us in a new Hyperbatonic age.
And now we reap both the rewards and the cost of that advancement. Our lives are certainly easier and require less of our dwindling energy resources, but we didn’t reckon on the lengthy half-life of slovenly speech, or the slow decay of structured sentences.
I think it depends on how tight-assed – properly hyphenated! – you want to be. The general rationale, AFAIK, is that “have” is not an auxiliary verb because it has an independent meaning (to possess). Thus, it is not a true auxiliary verb, which has no meaning without the second verb it is auxiliary to. You can use “have” in your standard SVO sentence; you can’t a true auxiliary verb such as should/must/ought.
Now, it seems to me that the verb phrase “have to” is very arguably a modal auxiliary phrase – it has to be, right? – so I can’t get too worked up when people say “have” is a modal auxiliary in that construction.
IOW, facetiousness aside, I wouldn’t argue against it either way, because it really doesn’t matter.
I think Miller’s point is that people who are correcting your spelling and grammar are hoping to help you make fewer mistakes…and, if you are spellchecking to be sure you don’t get corrected, then they are succeeding! That is, they tend to correct your spelling and grammar because it makes you paranoid (that is, more concerned about making a mistake), and therefore you are more careful, and make fewer mistakes.
Well let’s just be all logical and shit. Man, how can I be upset now…
goes and hunkers down in his corner…grumble, grumble…
(sorry Miller)
At least one dictionary lists it separately as an auxiliary verb specifically in this context: “to be required, compelled, or under obligation (fol. by infinitival to, with or without a main verb): I have to leave now. I didn’t want to study, but I had to.”
You make me hot.
Regards,
Shodan
Finally, someone’s speakin’ English.
No worries! Next time your friend corrects you for saying “who” instead of “whom,” ask him what the weather is like in the 19th century.
Then club him to the ground with a tire iron.
Sure! Right after I schedule 17 root canals for myself and some amateur eye surgery.
I think in most cases, people who correct grammar are trying to help. They’re trying to help you avoid annoying them again in future.
Well, fucking stop it already. It is obnoxious.
What, you don’t know that “can I?” can be used to ask for permission? Are you not a native speaker of American English?
So I just asked a sociolinguist, and she said that every variety of American English (including the prestige dialect) uses a flap (like a ‘d’ sound) in “little”, so even for a prescriptivist, you are crazy. So, unless you are British or something, what the fuck?
It’s even worse when it’s the other way around. A person is trying to be proper, but doesn’t quite get it. So as not to disparage anyone in particular I won’t provide a link, but here is something posted in GD a couple of days ago.
But whomever gets the nomination (and I doubt it’ll be Chertoff) is looking at a couple of nasty things…It’s like nails on a blackboard.
It’s broken, no doubt about it. But if I may hazard a guess as to what was going through the author’s head, while it may just have been an editing error, a brainfart, or one of those “‘whom’ is more formal and proper than ‘who’ and should be used in any context where such an air is desired” things, I think it’s possible that what arose here was a confusion from muddily thinking about semantics instead of thinking about syntax as one should: while the syntactic role played by the “whomever” in that sentence is that of grammatical subject, I suspect the author may have been thinking of it in terms of a semantic role: if X gets the nomination from Bush, the thinking would go, then Bush is the main actor and X is just the target of his actions. This gets conflated into X being something like a direct object rather than the subject of the sentence (as in the semantically equivalent but syntactically quite different “But whomever Bush nominates…”), and thus we see “whomever” rather than “whoever”.
Perhaps that’s a stretch, but that’s my theory. People should keep syntactic and semantic concepts clearly separated, but the layman doesn’t; it’s usually not a problem, as the layman isn’t doing much conscious linguistic analysis, but when trying to speak in an unnatural way, it may come up.
So I take it that she should stop because finding fault and correcting someone’s behavior are undesirable traits?