"After the English crown lost its grip on its French possessions, and France became an enemy, the English nobility began to speak English. But they still needed a shibboleth to separate themselves from the peasantry, and so they created their own English, the English of the privileged and the learned. This English had a grammar based on Latin, which is why it forbade structures natural to English, but foreign to Latin, such as the split infinitive (to boldly go) or the ending of a sentence with a preposition (the sort of arrant pedantry up with which Churchill reputedly refused to put)."