Oaf of office

Stephen Pinker has an interesting explanation of Obama's difficulties with the oath of office the other day. I'm not sure whether the split verb thing entirely convinces me, but it has a plausibility about it. Here's the articleEdge 272 and here's the guts of the claim: "How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? ... the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling. ... President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice's hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let's hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions."