This comment was posted today, April 17, 2018, by my Facebook friend Thel Reymundo Juarez on the Forum's Facebook Gateway:
Hi Jose, thanks for sharing this one. I do not know if this is a question of grammar but i would have written, "....designed, among other things, to...." - the comma, after ' designed' only because that's where i would have paused briefly...if i was speaking, not writing about the topic; i tend to write like i talk..or i think with my fingertips...is this okay? Thanks again!
My reply to Thel as posted on the Forum's Facebook Gateway:
Thel, examine this sentence construction in full using the unsplit infinitive "to curb":
“Second, public officials from the national level down to the local governments should undergo an English reorientation program designed, among others, to curb their predilection for using ‘at the end of the day’ and other dreadful clichés in public speaking engagements and media interviews.”
The construction clearly implies that there are several other English reorientation programs--not only one, which is really the case--that have been designed for the purpose of curbing that particular predilection.
Now look at this reconstruction of that sentence with the infinitive "to curb" split:
“Second, public officials from the national level down to the local governments should undergo an English reorientation program designed to, among others, curb their predilection for using ‘at the end of the day’ and other dreadful clichés in public speaking engagements and media interviews.”
This time, the sense is clearly that only one English reorientation program is being referred to, and that it was designed to perform several tasks other than the purpose of curbing that particular predilection that's actually stated in the sentence.
To further clarify this important distinction in sense, let's imagine a series of such other tasks being enumerated in that sentence:
“Second, public officials from the national level down to the local governments should undergo an English reorientation program designed to, among others: (a) curb their predilection for using ‘at the end of the day’ and other dreadful clichés in public speaking engagements and media interviews; (b) encourage their use of more precise and literal end-of-duration expressions like 'when the activity is over'; and (c) make them more conscious that habitual overuse of idiomatic expressions like 'at the end of the day' detracts from rather than enhance their credibility."
The above construction with "to curb" unsplit simply won't work because the intended sense gets lost altogether. Look:
“Second, public officials from the national level down to the local governments should undergo an English reorientation program designed, among others, (a) to curb their predilection for using ‘at the end of the day’ and other dreadful clichés in public speaking engagements and media interviews; (b) to encourage their use of more precise and literal end-of-duration expressions like 'when the activity is over'; and (c) make them more conscious that habitual overuse of idiomatic expressions like 'at the end of the day' detracts from rather than enhance their credibility."
I realize that we are walking on a slippery semantic slope here, but I trust that this has clarified rather than just further muddled the matter of using of split infinitives in some grammatical situations that call for them.
