Of Stylemongers and Split Infinitives

Just as those preachers who are least fastidious about Greek are often those who are most proficient in Greek (Moises Silva once remarked, "In my own preaching in the past twenty-five years, explicit references to Greek and Hebrew have become less and less frequent."), so those writers least fastidious about certain rules of grammar are often those most knowledgeable of grammar. After all, the man who wrote the following passage could think in Greek by the age of fifteen.

"Having said that the unliterary reader attends to the words too little to make anything like a full use of them, I must notice that there is another sort of reader who attends to them far too much and in the wrong way. I am thinking of what I call Stylemongers. On taking up a book, these people concentrate on what they call its 'style' or its 'English'. They judge this neither by its sound nor by its power to communicate but by its conformity to certain arbitrary rules. Their reading is a perpetual witch hunt for Americanisms, Gallicisms, split infinitives, and sentences that end with a preposition. They do not inquire whether the Americanism or the Gallicism in question increases or impoverishes the expressiveness of our language. It is nothing to them that the best English speakers and writers have been ending sentences with prepositions for over a thousand years. They are full of arbitrary dislikes for particular words. One is 'a word they have always hated'; another 'always makes them think of so-and-so'. This is too common, and that too rare. Such people are of all men least qualified to have an opinion about a style at all; for the only two tests that are really relevant...are the two they never apply. They judge the instrument by anything rather its power to do the thing it was made for; treat language as something that 'is' but does not 'mean'; criticise the lens after looking at it instead of through it."  

-C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism