to in this manner treat their brother. Modern English After its rise in Middle English, the construction became rare in the 15th and 16th centuries. William Shakespeare used it once, or perhaps twice. The uncontroversial example appears to be a syntactical inversion for the sake of meter: Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows Thy pity may deserve to pitied be (Sonnet 142). Edmund Spenser, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and the King James Version of the Bible used none, and they are very rare in the writing of Samuel Johnson. John Donne used them several times, though, and Samuel Pepys also used at least one. No reason for the near disappearance of the split infinitive is known; in particular, no prohibition is recorded. Split infinitives reappeared in the 18th century and became more common in the 19th. Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, and Willa Cather are among the writers who used them. Examples in the poems of Robert Burns attest its presence also in 18th-century Scots: Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride. ("The Cottar's Saturday Night") In colloquial speech, the construction came to enjoy widespread use. Today, according to the American Heritage Book of English Usage, "people split infinitives all the time without giving it a thought." In corpora of contemporary spoken English, some adverbs such as always and completely appear more often in the split position than the unsplit. Theories of origins Although it is difficult to say why the construction developed in Middle English, or why it revived so powerfully in Modern English, a number of theories have been postulated. Analogy Traditional grammarians have suggested that the construction appeared because people frequently place adverbs before finite verbs. George Curme writes: "If the adverb should immediately precede the finite verb, we feel that it should immediately precede also the infinitive…" Thus, if one says: She gradually got rid of her stutter. and She will gradually get rid of her stutter. one may, by analogy, wish to say: She wants to gradually get rid of her stutter. This is supported by the fact that split infinitives are often used as echoes, as in the following exchange, in which the riposte parodies the slightly odd collocation in the original sentence: Child: I accidentally forgot to feed the hamster. Parent: Well, you'll have to try harder not to "accidentally forget," won't you?