Dangling ...

A few years ago I shared on Facebook this Argyle Sweater comic I'd seen in the newspaper that day in 2017. A joke about a dangling participle--don't see a lot of those, now do we?

I shared it again this morning--then got to thinking about how (probably) there are lots of people out there who don't remember/know what a dangling participle is (not that such knowledge adds to the joke at all).

And so ... here we go: Dangling Participles 101 ...

• A participle is a verb that's behaving like an adjective
• I put on my walking shoes.  He had a broken heart. (In these examples, walking is no longer a verb but an adjective modifying shoes--same for broken, now an adjective modifying heart.)
• Sometimes, the participle is not a lone word but in a phrase
• walking through the woods ... broken by the experience ...
• English grammar demands (!) that when you use one of these phrases (called participial phrases), it must be next to the noun it's modifying
• Walking through the woods, I saw Bigfoot near the stream. (I'm doing the walking.)
• Broken by the experience, he vowed never to love again. (He was broken.)
• But ... if you misplace the participial phrase--if you put it next to some other noun--especially at the beginning of a sentence--then, my friends, you have a dangling participle. (It's dangling out there, not clear about what it's modifying.)
• Walking through the woods, the trees looked beautiful. (Were the trees walking?)
• Broken by the experience, the movies seemed to him a good idea. (Were the movies broken?)
• So ... you need to undangle the participles.
• Walking through the woods, I thought the trees looked beautiful.
• Broken by the experience, he thought going to the movies would be a good idea.

As a book reviewer, I'm surprised by how often I see danglers in the advance copies of new books I'm reading. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps they've become like other English "rules" that most of us no longer pay attention to--like the difference between will and shall, like the difference between like and as, like using the object pronoun in some constructions (between you and me--not between you and I), like the use of apostrophes in possessives (I'm guessing they will be all gone by the time my grandsons are my age--at the health club where I used to go, it said Mens above the men's locker room door).

I'm not a grammar Nazi. I recognize that we made all of this up--Moses did not bring the rules down the mountain with him. They are conventions of writing, not really anything else. We can break them when we need or want to. Sure, I still believe we should teach them--learn them (we need to learn how to use a knife and fork--but we can still eat pizza with our hands).

But ... I do like to adhere to those conventions in most writing I do--not all, obviously, for I just started a sentence with a conjunction--a no-no when I was a student!

And (again I did it!) I'll end with a naughty joke I heard years ago.

A new Harvard freshman, walking around the campus, stopped someone who looked like a professor, and asked: "Could you tell me where the library is at?"

The professor haughtily replied: "At Harvard we do not end our sentences with a preposition!"

"Oh," said the frosh. "Okay. Could you tell me where the library is at, asshole?"