Is "The MSO/MSE Split is soon underway" grammatically correct?

We're in the middle of a historical time. Two creatures will be separated from each other. Waffles will be torn in two. Meta Stack Overflow will be split.

This banner is currently being shown on Meta Stack Overflow and on Stack Overflow itself:

The MSO/MSE Split is soon underway. Please bear with us while this is completed.

The first sentence caught my eye, specifically the last few words: "is soon underway". I'm not sure this is grammatically correct - my internal "something-isn't-right" meter doesn't like it. If I had to guess I'd say it should read "is underway soon", but that doesn't sound quite right either.

I can't put a finger on what, exactly, is wrong with the sentence, nor what should be done to fix it. Can anyone explain this to me?

Solution 1:

I would say:

The MSO/MSE split will soon be underway. Please bear with us while this is completed.

Solution 2:

The problem is that the word is means "the current state of the thing". It implies temporal information -- now, this instant. It conflicts with the rest of the sentence's meaning.

What is the MSO/MSE split? It's underway.

... But it's not underway now. It will be underway soon. So, it's not underway.

The verb's tense/meaning conflicts with the adjective being used. I think the sentence is still technically grammatical -- it just feels odd because of the construction.

Solution 3:

Apart from the fact that the present tense is is perhaps awkward with the future-deictic adverb soon, as commented on in Jeff’s answer, there is a different, more semantic clash going on:

Being underway means that something is not yet here, but it is being worked on, and it is therefore on the way and will be here at some as yet undisclosed time in the (hopefully not too distant) future.

Now, arguably, if you're going to implement a change like this, the work that enables you to say that the change is underway really already starts as soon as it has been definitively decided that the change should and will be implemented (unless you're in the public sector where you'd decide this and then do nothing about it for five years until your department is merged into another department that deals with something completely unrelated to your department and the plans are acrapped altogether, of course).

So it doesn't really make sense to say that the split is (or will be) underway soon—the very fact that this message has been put up is part of the process leading up to the split, which ipso facto means that the split is already underway.

If I were to fix the notice, I would either swap soon underway with coming soon, or I'd just leave out soon altogether and say that the split is underway.

Solution 4:

A form that seems to flow better, to me, is "The [split] is happening soon. Please bear..."

This has the added benefit of still making sense when you replace 'soon' with 'right now'.

(as suggested by @badp)

Solution 5:

According to “Google NGram Viewer”, soon underway is used almost 4 times more often than underway soon or soon be underway.