To Boldly Split Infinitives

Last night I felt that I was a bit overloaded with the doings of Captain Kirk and company and decided to have a break from Star Trek for one night at least.  However the series has made me cogitate on the legality of using split infinitives, once a total grammatical no-no.  There was quite a lively debate when Star Trek was firsts released because of the introduction to each episode:

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

Since no-one could do anything to alter that shocking use of that split infinitive the consensus was that it was perfectly acceptable in the circumstances as it gave emphasis; ‘to go boldly’ was all a bit ho-hum after all.  I don’t think that later generations even know what a split infinitive is and certainly they feel at liberty to boldly use them.

I pulled out my copy of ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ by Lynne Truss but like me she is a member of the comma police and doesn’t do grammar so I went to Google where I found this:-

Split infinitive. ... A well-known example occurs in the opening sequence of the Star Trek television series: "to boldly go where no man has gone before"; the adverb boldly is said to split the infinitive to go.

As I mentioned above, there was quite a controversy when Star Trek was first released and that phrase will be remembered by posterity.

The Limerick:-

A dentist named Archibald Moss

Fell in love with the dainty Miss Ross,

But he held in abhorrence

Her given name, Florence,

So he renamed her his Dental Floss.

The formatting has gone a bit awry due to the copy/paste and I can't fix it without typing in the whole thing again.  Sorry about that . . .