Later on in this section, when we explore the verb in more detail, we will find out that infinitives perform a very important role in our language: They allow us to write infinitive phrases, as in to have, to hold, to love, to honor, to cherish. Thus, an infinitive verb has no finite state of time, people, or number of people. It could be a football game with 22 people playing, or it could be a game of solitaire. You don’t know how many people are playing the game. Thus, when I write the infinitive phrase to win the game, you have no idea about whether this game took place in the past, is going on right now, or will take place in the future. The infinitive has no reference in time (tense), reveals nothing about the agent of the verb-like activity (person), says not a word about how many people are engaging in that verb-like activity (number), and says nothing about the nature of the statement (mood). The true notion of infinitive and finite verbs finally jelled.
Many, many years after those glorious days in Miss Hamrick’s English class, it all began to come together. Either infinitive should be infinite or finite should be, uh, finitive. Seems to me, they should make the terms more symmetrical. It took me quite some time to realize that a finite verb is the opposite of an infinitive verb. The word infinitive just didn’t seem to help. Under this cosmic view, verbs led to nowhere, or at least to some other planet far, far away. I kept getting hung up on notions of infinity. This always stumped me back in Miss Hamrick’s class.
Thus, for any verb, you know the infinitive form: It’s the word you would ordinarily look up in the dictionary. You wouldn’t look up making, you would look up make. You wouldn’t look up written in the dictionary. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t look up seen in the dictionary. The infinitive form of a verb is the one you would ordinarily look up in the dictionary.
I, on the other hand, have developed a definition requiring only a single sentence:
Academic tomes might go on for pages defining the meaning of the infinitive form of a verb.
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