At breakfast on Aug. 26 I was reading a heartwarming story about Pete Sampras’ farewell to tennis. Reporter Rachel Nichols covered the event for The Washington Post.

“A minute into the standing ovation,” she wrote, “Sampras started to quietly weep.”

“To quietly weep”? Egad! Ms. Nichols had split an infinitive. Good for her.

For the record, an infinitive is split when a writer inserts one or more adverbs between “to” and the verb itself. There was a time – and it wasn’t so very long ago – when respected stylists condemned the split absolutely. Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage recounts the objections of 18th-century grammarians. The most entertaining discussion of the split appears in Fowler’s “Modern English Usage.” You will find a hundred splits reviewed in professor George Curme’s definitive volume on syntax.

In 1998, the Oxford University Press approved split infinitives in principle. At the University of Connecticut, professor Samuel Pickering reacted with remarkable hauteur. “I do not dine,” he said, “with those who split infinitives.”

The gentleman must stay hungry in literary circles, for the roster of fearless splitters includes some famous names: Pepys, Defoe, Burke, Coleridge, Lamb and Dr. Johnson himself. In the 19th century one could find “to fully appreciate” in Macaulay and “to really understand” in Oliver W. Holmes. More recently, we find “to really live” in Ernest Hemingway, “to cautiously avoid” in John O’Hara, and “to really bury the silver” in William Faulkner.

A few notables are remembered for their banana splits (infinitives with at least two scoops of adverb in the middle). Thus Mark Twain wrote of a river commission’s scheme “to arbitrarily and permanently confine the channel.” James Thurber recalled a moment when Harold Ross, longtime editor of The New Yorker, instructed him: “Tell Sayre to damn well and soon return those proofs.” Fowler cites an English reviewer who said of a book: “Its main idea is to historically, even while events are maturing, and divinely – from the Divine point of view – impeach the European system of church and states.” You could send that sentence out to be framed. Or shot.

Getting back to breakfast: On the same morning when Sampras began to quietly weep, other writers for the Post also were splitting away.

As she was graduated from high school, wrote Jennifer Huget, the last thing on her mind was staying healthy enough “to someday attend my 25th reunion.”

In the Business Section, Steven Gray reported that developing countries are objecting to a pending trade agreement. The document “fails to fully reaffirm the group’s commitment to eliminating farm subsidies.”

On the op-ed page, columnist Nicholas Eberstadt commented that North Korea might be persuaded to promise to give up its nuclear program. “It just can’t be persuaded to actually keep the promise.”

In the Metro section, Avram Goldstein covered an outbreak of respiratory infections at Sibley Hospital, “prompting the hospital to temporarily shut clinical units.” Staff writer Katherine Shaver began her story, “To better manage highway construction …”

And in a letter to Dear Abby, back on the comic pages, a minister in Pennsylvania provided a banana split. He rued the inability of many couples “to openly and honestly communicate and to really listen and hear each other.”

I was born, so to speak, in 1740 and hence began with a prejudice against the split infinitive. It seemed to me that good verbs, like good marriages, should not be torn asunder. With the passage of years, I abandoned this uncompromising view. Now my thought is that clarity and cadence count for more than the dicta of 18th-century grammarians. There is indeed a difference between “to state flatly” and “to flatly state,” and we ought to preserve it.

The Post’s tennis writer could have said that Sampras “started quietly to weep,” or that he “started to weep quietly,” but she put the adverb in the middle and the sentence worked.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.