Where No Grammarian Has Gone Before

A warning before we go anywhere: this essay meanders intentionally. It will digress, double back, and occasionally stop to look at something shiny at the side of the road. Consider this your early consent form. Follow me into the weeds — there’s a payoff, but we’re taking the scenic route to get to it.

I should confess my credentials up front, since they are not the credentials of a grammarian. Long before I owned a copy of Fowler, long before Google existed to correct me, a few other girls and I would gather round the Oxford English Dictionary at sleepovers like conspirators, hunting for the naughty words — the ones we suspected existed but had never been allowed to say out loud, now sitting there in cold, respectable, etymological print, footnoted and dated and utterly without shame.

It is, I think, the only proper introduction to lexicography: discovering that a dictionary is not a fence around language, but a museum of everything language has ever dared to do. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is the only other dictionary that has ever made me laugh outright — not smirk, not admire — laugh, and it did it as an adult, in a completely different register, but it is the same discovery wearing a different coat. Somebody, it turns out, had been standing at the door of the English language the whole time, cataloguing its transgressions with barely suppressed delight.

The Boardroom

In the 1980s, when I was doing corporate facilitation work, mission statements were having a moment. Every executive team wanted one, and almost none of them could write one, because writing one requires admitting what you actually intend to do, in language plain enough that the person with the least power in the building could repeat it back to you. So I used to steal from Star Trek.

I would recite the theme, from memory, the way you’d recite a nursery rhyme:

“These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise — its five-year mission — to seek out strange new worlds and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Then I’d make my pitch.

Think of asking the most junior person aboard the Enterprise — someone down in the bowels of the ship, wrench in hand, no idea what deck he’s on — three questions.

“How long is the mission?”
“Five years, Sir!”
“What is the mission?”“Seek out new worlds and new civilizations, Sir!”
“And how will we do it?”
“Sir, Boldly, Sir!”

There’s even an emotion built in — one word, doing the work an entire values statement usually fails to do in three or four paragraphs. So, paraphrase your own mission statement the same way:

“This is the voyage of XYZ Company. Its five-year mission: to seek new markets, to build new products, and to boldly go where no widget manufacturer has gone before.”

It always worked. Executives who couldn’t get through a workshop without saying “synergy” would suddenly produce something with a spine, because I’d smuggled a plain-language exercise into the room disguised as a television theme song.

What I didn’t know at the time — what I’m only putting together now, decades later, with a dictionary in my lap — is that I was doing something Ernest Gowers would have recognized instantly. Gowers wrote Plain Words in 1948, a slim, ruthless little guide commissioned to stop British civil servants from writing memos no citizen could understand. He was brought in to revise Fowler for its second edition in 1965 precisely because he’d spent a career doing what I attempted in those boardrooms: forcing people whose instinct was to sound important to instead be understood. The junior-crewman test and the plain-citizen test are the same test.

Can the person with the least power in the room tell you, in one sentence, what we are doing? Most mission statements fail it spectacularly, because vagueness reads as gravitas to the people writing it, and specificity feels like exposure. Kirk’s opening monologue passes because it has nowhere to hide: two verbs, one timeframe, one adverb carrying all the feeling.

That adverb is worth a full stop. “To boldly go” is a split infinitive — the to and the go wrenched apart to let “boldly” stand between them — and generations of English teachers would have reached for the red pen. But say it the “correct” way: “to go boldly where no one has gone before…” — the energy drains straight out of the sentence; the adverb trails off like an afterthought. Say it the other “correct” way: “boldly to go…” and it sounds like a hymn, all starch and Sunday best. “To boldly go” puts the stress exactly where the emotion is, mid-stride, which is why it sounds like momentum instead of description. Whoever wrote it — and the historical record is not tidy on this point, more on that shortly — had an ear good enough to know the sentence needed the “wrong” word order to do its job.

The Dictionary in the Library of the Mind

Long before I ever saw a photograph of H. W. Fowler, I had built him in my head from nothing but the words on the page: a man in a home library, fire lit, a dog at his feet, sensible leather patches on the elbows, a pipe going, a cup of tea within reach, chuckling quietly to himself as he wrote something devastating about the misuse of “hopefully.” I built that man out of tone alone — out of the sense, entry after entry, that here was someone enjoying himself.

It turns out I wasn’t far off, though I somewhat prefer the details I invented to the reality.

Fowler has a blue plaque at 14 Paultons Square, Chelsea, put up by English Heritage in 2016, three doors down from one commemorating Samuel Beckett. How many other grammarians can say that? The surviving photographs show a lean, energetic man, sometimes bald, sometimes balding, with a neat goatee that gives him a passing resemblance to Freud. He is more often photographed mid-exercise-routine than mid-armchair. He bathed in the Serpentine every morning of his life in London, summer and winter alike, and jogged the distance back to Chelsea at what his biographers clock at nine or ten miles an hour — a pace, I’ll note, that suggests a man outrunning something, likely wearing tweed.

He worked those years as a freelance journalist, scraping by on a small inheritance and magazine fees, and quietly gave money to his landlady’s husband, a policeman recovering from a nervous breakdown — a detail that tells you more about the private man than any dictionary entry could.

And the dog was real: Raven, a black dog, photographed crouched beside him, because of course there was a dog. A man who swims through an English winter for pleasure and gives his rent money to a stranger’s convalescing husband is not, whatever the prose suggests, a man who needed a fire and a cardigan to be interesting. I gave him the fireside and a dog; history gave him cold water, also a dog, and a pipe clenched between his teeth mid-stride. (The pipe, for the record, belonged to Fowler, not the dog — there goes my grammar.)

He was, tellingly, the son of a clergyman — the Reverend Robert Fowler, a Cambridge man who taught mathematics at Tonbridge School — yet our Henry became, quietly and for good, an atheist. He turned down a housemastership at Sedbergh rather than pretend to prepare boys for a confirmation he no longer believed in. I find that detail load-bearing for the whole project of “Modern English Usage”. A man who wouldn’t perform belief he didn’t hold went on to spend the rest of his working life refusing to let anyone else perform sophistication they didn’t have either. Elegant variation and religious hypocrisy are, in Fowler’s moral universe, close cousins: both are ways of saying something you don’t mean because it sounds better than the plain truth.

And the entries themselves are where the laughter lives. “Elegant variation” is his name for a journalist’s tic — refusing to repeat a word, so that a man becomes “the defendant,” then “the accused,” then “the burly Yorkshireman,” purely to avoid saying “he” twice, as if repetition were a confession of poverty rather than a form of control.

“Battered ornaments” gathers everything worn glassy-smooth from overuse — the phrases people reach for believing they’re being vivid, unaware the phrase died of exhaustion years ago.

And then there are what he calls the “superstitions”, or “fetishes”: never split an infinitive, never end a sentence on a preposition, never open with “and” or “but” (note: which I just did, living fetish-free). Fowler didn’t invent these taboos — they’re 18^th century Latinate imports, rules borrowed from a language English isn’t — but he was one of the first people with real authority to say, in print, that they were nonsense dressed up as discipline. His verdict on them, more or less: unintelligent obedience to an unintelligent rule.

Which brings us back, at last, to the split infinitive, and to my favourite passage in the whole dictionary — the taxonomy. Fowler divides the English-speaking world into five classes on the subject: those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; those who don’t know but worry about it anyway; those who know and condemn; those who know and approve; and a fifth class, the smallest, who know the rule and simply follow their instinct, splitting or not splitting as the sentence demands.

“Happy the man who belongs to this class,” he writes, “happier still is he who belongs to the first.”

It is, structurally, a joke about anxiety: part of the five categories are defined by unease, and only the fifth writes freely, because only the fifth has stopped asking permission.

“To boldly go” is the fifth class in action. Nobody who insisted on “to go boldly” would have given the 20^th century a line people still recite from memory sixty years on. The “wrong” version is correct and forgettable. The “right” version is wrong and immortal.

Journalists All

It’s worth setting Fowler next to two other men who spent careers policing — or celebrating — the English language, because the differences are more interesting than the overlaps, and I find myself thinking of the three of them as strands of the same rope, twisting toward and away from each other across a century: Fowler next to George Orwell and Bill Bryson.

All three were journalists at some point, not academics; none of them wrote from inside a university. And all three had fathers whose occupations shaped, in very different ways, what the son eventually did with a sentence.

Fowler’s father was a clergyman.

Orwell’s father worked as a sub-deputy opium agent for the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production of opium in Bengal for sale into China — a career built entirely on institutional euphemism, on calling an extraction economy an “agency.” It is hard not to think that a lifelong distrust of language that hides what it’s doing had a very literal source at Orwell’s own breakfast table.

Bryson’s father, by contrast, was a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register for 50 years, and his mother was the same paper’s home-furnishings editor — two working journalists under one roof, on rather workaday beats, which may explain why Bryson never developed either Fowler’s schoolmasterly authority or Orwell’s moral dread. He just thinks the whole enterprise of English is funny, and writes accordingly.

The temperaments follow the fathers, more or less. Fowler is amused by bad English — a lapse in taste, evidence that a writer hasn’t thought hard enough about the gap between sounding impressive and being clear.

Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, is alarmed by it — vague, abstract prose isn’t bad taste to him, it’s a political tool, the mechanism by which atrocity gets described without being felt.

Bryson is neither gently amused nor alarmed; he’s delighted, a tourist marvelling at the sheer, glorious mess of English rather than a magistrate trying to tidy it. If Fowler is the strict but funny uncle, and Orwell the uncle who thinks manners are survival, Bryson is the cousin who thinks the whole family is hilarious and isn’t trying to fix anyone.

Run Fowler’s five-class taxonomy over all three and it holds up nicely. Fowler is obviously in the fifth class; the instinct-follower, at peace with the rule and unafraid to break it. Orwell reads like the third class pushed into a moral register; he knows and condemns, but condemns with real stakes, because for him bad grammar and political rot are the same failure at different volumes. Bryson is in the first class, joyfully; he doesn’t much care what the split infinitive is, he cares that people once fought wars over it, and finds the fighting funnier than the rule itself.

One Rule to Rule Them All

It’s worth pausing on what Orwell actually prescribed, because set next to Fowler’s entries, the two men turn out to agree on almost everything except why it matters.

At the end of “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell offers six rules for the working writer: never use a metaphor or figure of speech you’re used to seeing in print; never use a long word where a short one will do; cut any word you can cut; prefer the active voice to the passive; avoid a foreign phrase, a scientific term, or jargon if a plain English word exists; and — the rule that gives away the game — break any of the first five sooner than write something outright barbarous.

Line that up against Fowler’s own catalogue and the overlap is almost exact. “Never use a metaphor you’re used to seeing in print” is categorized under battered ornaments. “Never use a long word where a short one will do” is the same instinct behind Fowler’s entry on “avoidance of the obvious”, in which he argues that in choice of words, the obvious is generally better than a clever dodge around it — don’t reach for the fancier word just to prove you thought of one. Even Orwell’s sixth rule, the escape hatch, is Fowler’s fifth class wearing a new hat: know the rule well enough to break it on purpose, rather than obeying it or defying it out of nerves.

Where they part ways is stakes: Fowler’s version of a bad sentence is a solicitor’s letter, or a newspaper reporter reaching for “the burly Yorkshireman” instead of “he”; Orwell’s version of a bad sentence can describe a massacre without anyone feeling it happen. Fowler is diagnosing a lapse in taste; Orwell is diagnosing a mechanism, the specific one by which vague language lets people look away from what’s actually being done in their name.

Read side by side, the two men sound less like a stylist and a moralist than like a doctor and an epidemiologist examining the same symptom at two different scales — one treating the patient in front of him, the other tracing how the disease spreads through a population. Both would have recognized a corporate mission statement on sight. Fowler would have found it merely tedious. Orwell would have wanted to know what it was for and what lay beneath it.

Where The Sentence Actually Came From

So, who split that famous Star Trek infinitive? The honest answer is that nobody can say for certain.

Samuel Peeples wrote the second Star Trek pilot, titled “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and is credited with putting the phrase into circulation. The opening narration itself wasn’t drafted until August 1966, weeks before the series aired, and went through several versions — an early draft describes “the United Space Ship Enterprise” on a “five year galaxy patrol” in language so flat it could be a shipping manifest. The final wording is credited to the combined work of Gene Roddenberry, producer John D. F. Black, and associate producer Bob Justman, but I can find no source that cleanly assigns the split infinitive itself to one of the three by name. Somewhere in that room, someone had Fowler’s ear without necessarily having read Fowler.

And the phrase itself is older than any of them. In 1958, in the panic that followed Sputnik, President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee published a pamphlet called “Introduction to Outer Space”, arguing for a national space program. Its opening justification was the human urge to explore: “the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.” No one. Gender-neutral, government prose, a few years before Roddenberry’s writers’ room existed. The Star Trek team narrowed it to “no man” for 1966 television; it took until Star Trek: The Next Generation, more than twenty years later, for “no one” to make its way back into the opening title. NASA closed the loop entirely in 1989, titling its own Apollo retrospective “Where No Man Has Gone Before” — a government phrase that travelled into fiction, got a corporate-friendly split infinitive stitched onto it along the way, and eventually wandered home.

Which means that when I stood in front of executives in the 1980s, reciting James T. Kirk from memory to facilitate mission-statement writing, the sentence I was borrowing had already lived one entire lifetime inside a government pamphlet before Star Trek ever recruited it, and I was recruiting it for another. None of us in that room knew it. The phrase didn’t care. It just kept doing its job, the way a good sentence does, regardless of who’s currently claiming credit for it.

Coda (Pace: Orwell’s Fifth Rule)

I still think about that pre-adolescent circle of girls hunched over the OED, hunting for words we weren’t supposed to know, and I think the impulse never really left me — I just traded contraband for craft. Fowler’s dictionary rewards the same appetite: the sense that language has secret rooms, and that somebody, at some point, is going to let you in on the joke.

Happy the man or woman who belongs to the fifth class. Happier still the one who found their way there by way of a starship, a boardroom, and a very old dictionary with a delightful sense of humour.

References

• English Heritage, “Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933),” Blue Plaques archive, erected 2016, 14 Paultons Square, Chelsea.
• H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2^nd edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
• Wikipedia, “H. W. Fowler,” biographical detail on family, education, and career (accessed 2026).
• George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946).
• Wikipedia and the Orwell Foundation, biographical detail on Richard Walmesley Blair’s career in the Indian Civil Service Opium Department (accessed 2026).
• Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue (1990) and Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words (2002 revision of The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, 1983).
• Wikipedia, “Bill Bryson” and “Bill Bryson Sr.,” biographical detail on family and career (accessed 2026).
• Wikipedia, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” production history of the Star Trek opening narration, credited to Gene Roddenberry, John D. F. Black, and Bob Justman, with the phrase’s introduction credited to Samuel A. Peeples (accessed 2026).
• The President’s Science Advisory Committee, Introduction to Outer Space (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 26 March 1958).
• Dwayne A. Day, “Boldly Going: Star Trek and Spaceflight,” The Space Review, 28 November 2005.