A fair amount of grammatical mythology has found its way into English. For example, "split infinitives".
For example, a sentence of mine might read: “It is better to awkwardly insert a word inside an infinitive than to mindlessly follow ancient rules of grammar.” In a sentence like that, this partner (a very good writer) would move the adverbs before the word “to,” so that the sentence read: “It is better awkwardly to insert a word inside an infinitive than mindlessly to follow ancient rules of grammar.”
I have read, in a fairly reputable source, that this ancient rule of grammar is rather more ancient than many think. It was adopted in English in an attempt to make it function more like Latin, presumably because Latin was considered a higher-class language. (In Latin, of course, it's impossible to split an infinitive without hyphenating it at the end of a line. Even then, no one would dream of putting extra words in the gap.)
English derives from the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language tree, and one of the features it retains from German is the notion of a separable verb. For example, "anziehen" means "to put on" (well, "pull on") as in clothing. "Ich ziehe meine Schuhe an" means "I'm putting my shoes on."
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