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Suppose you encountered a patch of black ice on your way to work this morning. Let’s look at a few of the ways you might describe the experience, and the differences in clarity among them.
(1) On my way to work, I slid on a patch of ice. Perfectly grammatical, perfectly clear. Oh, wait; were you walking, or driving? Hmmm. It would require additional words to remove that ambiguity, wouldn’t it?
(2) As I was driving to work, my car slid on a patch of ice. That’s better. Perfectly grammatical, perfectly clear, and now unambiguous.
(3) Driving to work, I slid on a patch of ice. Also perfectly grammatical, and perfectly clear.
(4) Driving to work, my car slid on a patch of ice. Oops. _base_d on conventional language wisdom, you’ve also hit a grammatical pothole. A phrase like “Driving to work” is supposed to modify the nearest noun, in this case the noun that’s the subject of the sentence. That noun being “car,” your English instructor Dr. Boring will ask you to explain how your car could be driving to work. Then Dr. Boring will likely seize upon this teachable moment to discuss participial phrases.
Let’s do that, shall we? And let’s not let our eyes glaze over, OK?
A participle is an adjective formed from a verb; it usually ends in -ing or -ed. In the third and fourth examples above, driving is a participle. It’s formed from the verb drive, and the phrase “driving to work” is a participial phrase. Got that? The whole phrase is an adjective depicting an action that some noun is taking.
But which noun? Car, the subject of the sentence and the normal candidate, isn’t doing the action (driving to work). Maybe another noun in the sentence? Well, clearly, the patch isn’t doing the action. And the ice isn’t doing the action. Oh dear. We have an adjective—that participial phrase “driving to work”—that’s been left dangling, with no clearly identifiable noun to modify.
Ah hah. So that’s what a dangling participle is. (Dangling modifier or misplaced modifier are the more generic terms for language transgressions like this; the usages don’t always involve participles.)
Here’s a classic dangling participle seen in the wild: “Covered with sheep bones, ashes, and a dark substance believed to be blood, Professor Benjamin Mazar said there was no doubt about the holiness and antiquity of the excavation.”
According to the principles of grammatical usage, the sentence is saying that Professor Benjamin Mazar is covered with sheep bones, ashes, and a dark substance believed to be blood. He is, after all, the noun nearest to the participial phrase; but that reading of the sentence would obviously be laughable. Could the participial phrase perhaps be modifying one of the other nouns in the sentence? Not likely; doubt, holiness, and antiquity wouldn’t be covered with sheep bones, ashes, and a dark substance believed to be blood. Excavation might be a candidate, but we’ll see in a moment that it’s not what we’re looking for either. Conclusion: We have a participle with nothing in the sentence to modify.
The odd thing about this and many other dangling participles is that the intended meaning is in fact communicated. It just takes extra effort on the part of the reader. In this case the reader has to go back to the preceding sentence (“Zartal said his group found the altar on Mount Ebal and that the 27-foot-by-21-foot altar fit the one described in the Book of Joshua 8:30-35 exactly”) to find the noun being modified: altar.
Most readers will do this bit of mental research so automatically that they won’t even be aware that a grammatical principle has been violated. Others—and you know who you are—will invariably spot these misplaced modifiers, and will snerk at the unintended humor.
Of course, some of us are more snerk-prone than others…
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