Today’s old-fashioned English pet peeve: from whence is redundant. Whence already means from+where. “Go back whence you came!” is correct.
true, but the use is attested to at least 1592. a little bit of pleonasm never hurt anyone.
To Shakespeare, no less:
Let them be whipp'd through every market town till they come to Berwick, from whence they came. (Henry VI, Part 2, 1592)
And the King James Version (1611) of the Bible is a garbage translation of Biblical languages, but is exceptionally stylish English:
And the Lord said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. (Job 2:2)
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. (Psalm 121)
This is like how splitting infinitives is technically incorrect but “to boldly go where no man has gone before” objectively kicks ass.
#I mean wasn't “splitting infinitives” just smth a guy Made Up bc he thought english should act like latin and greek and stuff
Yeah, pretty much. The infinitive in Greek and Latin is a single word, and so cannot be divided, so he felt that English should work the same way
But I'd argue that things like "to boldly go" aren't actually "split infinitives" at all, because I'd argue that "go" by itself is the full infinitive, "to" is simply a particle which is frequently placed before the infinitive. But it's not actually part of the infinitive, as can be seen in constructions like "I must go" where there's no "to". So, to claim that "to" and the verb shouldn't be separated is, in my mind, as silly as if one were to make the same claim about putting adjectives between an article and its noun, calling "the tall man" a "split nominative", just because "the man" would be translated as a single word in Latin
