ical illustrations:

|The Rev. Mr. Tomlinson states that he wants a |
|steady, religious young man to look after his garden|
|and care for his cow who has a good voice and is |
|accustomed to singing in the choir. |

|Atkinson telephoned that he was at Zeibski's corners|
|in his machine and had his wife with him. She had |
|died on him and he wanted the garage company to come|
|out and pull her in. |

=150. Split Infinitive.=--Next to faulty reference in frequency comes
the use of incorrect verb forms. Of these probably the most common error
among cub reporters is the employment of the split infinitive,--_to
quickly run_ instead of _to run quickly_. The split infinitive is not
necessarily an error. There are times when one's precise meaning can be
expressed only by the use of an adverb between _to_ and its infinitive.
But as a rule one should avoid the construction. Certainly there was no
excuse for the following in a Chicago paper:

|President Yuan Shi Kai declared he was willing to |
|permit Professor Frank Johnson Goodnow of Brooklyn, |
|legal adviser to the Chinese government, to in |
|August accept the presidency of Johns Hopkins |
|University. |

=151. Infinitive and Participle with Verbs.=--The use of the infinitive
and the participle with the past tense of verbs is also a cause of
frequent error. Our English rule regarding these parts of the verb is
mainly a matter of usage, accuracy in which may be attained only by
habits of correct speech. But if the reporter will bear in mind that the
infinitive and the participle have no finite tense of their own, that
they always express time relative to the time of the main verb, he will
have taken a real precaution toward preventing confusion. For example,
the newspaper man who wrote,

|Detective McGuire had intended to have arrested him |
|when he began blowing the safe, |

did not say what he meant, because the past infinitive here makes the
writer say that Detective McGuire had intended to have the yeggman
already under arrest when he began blowing the safe. What the writer
meant to say was:

|Detective McGuire had intended to arrest him when he|
|began blowing the safe. |

Likewise the reporter was inaccurate who wrote:

|Going