Everything about Rachel Toor’s column in Saturday’s Spokesman-Review is absolutely spot-on.
Well…almost everything.
Toward the end she writes, “As a professor, I’ve learned no longer to be shocked…”
Anything seem off about that? What if it were “As a professor, I’ve learned to no longer be shocked…”?
I’m not sure whether Toor chose the former construction so as to avoid splitting the infinitive—doubtful—or whether it just sounds better to her ear. Or heck, maybe it’s legit and I’m just not smart enough to know it. (FYI: You’ll never lose money betting on the Aaron-is-an-idiot side.)
Doesn’t really matter, though, because two sentences later she gives us “Writing well is hard, hard, hard, hard, hard.” Forget everything else in the column. If just one person I know reads that line and remembers it, Ms. Toor deserves to be canonized.
