whether ’tis nobler in the mind to doubly miss the point
A little incident in folk grammar, funny to me at least. I wrote a sentence containing
. . . which led to reconstructing in my mind . . .
because
. . . which led to mentally reconstructing . . .
seemed wrong: everyone knows you don’t put an adverb between to and a verb form! (You’ll note that to reconstructing is not an infinitive, so the ‘rule’ does not apply.)
When I became consciously aware of that confused subconscious reasoning, I changed it to the latter.
I wonder how many now-standard grammatical features we owe to such extensions of misunderstanding.
In “Heart of Gold”:
To avoid ending a clause with ‘of’, one could recast it to
or (thence)
but would that mean the same?