But did it stick? Was it ever really a rule? The Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t see anything wrong with splitting infinitives. Even stodgy Strunk & White say, in The Elements of Style:
That may sound like a “don’t split infinitives” rule, but later in the book it says
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The split infinitive is another trick of rhetoric in which the ear must be quicker than the handbook. Some infinitives seem to improve on being split…
[QUOTE]
Overall, this “rule” has been routinely violated for at least half a millenium, and scorned by many grammarians and writers.
You are correct. Usually when I’ve heard this argument (or one similar) brought forth before, the example has been “ne…pas”. I have only a marginal grasp of French (took it for a couple years in junior high), but enough to know that the ne…pas construction is a single unit, even though there are words in between. But I know no Polish at all, so I was assuming (incorrectly, it seems) that the construction there worked the same way as in French.
As for “man”, the opening monologue of Star Trek is itself a cite that “man” is still used in its gender-exclusive sense today. If one is to argue political correctness, then the revised version “…where no one has gone before” is far worse, since every episode, wherever they go, they find that someone else has in fact gone there before. It’s just plain incorrect. On the other hand, even if one insists upon interpreting “man” to mean “male human” (against the obvious intention of the authors), the original form is still factually correct: If no human has ever gone to a particular place, that then implies that no male human has, either. To be both factually and politically correct, it should perhaps be phrased “…where no human has gone before”, but that doesn’t scan as well, and there’s an awful lot you can justify in the name of poetic license.
Although it is commonly stated that ne plus one of the negative particles pas, aucun, personne, rien, etc., is a single unit, in fact this is simply a case of a double negative being the preferred form.
Both ne and the particles are inherently negative by themselves, as you can see in various constructions where they can be used by themselves. If you use ne by itself, as “Je n’ose dire…” (“I dare not say…”), a slightly poetic or formal construction, it is still negative.
Likewise, if you say un homme connu par personne, you are using the particle “personne” without the “ne” but it still has negative value.
Moreover, the particles are distinguished from their roots in a variety of ways; even though historically Je n’ai vu personne did indeed literally mean “I did-not see (a) person” – just as you could say Je n’ai dit mot – it can now be distinguished by the fact that the noun “personne” is feminine, but the negative particle “personne” isn’t: personne ici n’est heureux. Likewise, in many lects of French the pronunciation of “plus” has diverged depending on whether it’s negative or positive: in Quebec, il n’y en a plus [plœs] is “there is more”; il n’y en a plus [py] is “there is none.”