What’s
the us(ag)e?
The Sixties, a distant memory for many of us, is not a memory at all for the majority of my students, though that fact is hard for me to accept. Never trust anyone over thirty? Could anyone have actually said such a thing? Of course, people did. And they believed it. But they were, obviously, very young. Worse things were said in those days, like the Pentagon spokesman who said during the Vietnam War that “We had to destroy the village in order to save it from the Viet Cong.” That statement, like the war itself, was an obscenity. [Obscene: “Offensive to prevailing concepts of morality or decency.”] But what is this about dangling phrases? They are not obscene. I just wanted to get your attention.
Dangling phrases certainly aren’t offensive to anyone’s morality or sense of decency, but they are confusing. And, perhaps, if we stretch the meaning of “offensive” to the breaking point, confusion could be considered an obscenity. What, then, is a dangling phrase? But first of all is this question: what is a phrase (not a phase, like tie-dyed shirts and psychedelic music)?
First of all, like most issues of grammar, we start with the sentence. The basic English sentence contains a subject, verb, and an object phrase. Here is an example:
John hit the ball. A phrase is a word collection that is not a sentence (lacking as it does a full verb or a subject) but modifies a noun within the sentence.
Examples are: With a vigorous swing, John hit the ball. “With a vigorous swing” is a prepositional phrase. It begins with the preposition “with” and contains neither a subject nor a verb and it modifies (gives additional information about) the noun “John.”
And this one: Hands shaking, I accepted the award for the excellent essay called “The dangling phrase and other obscenities.” “Hands shaking” contains the subject “hands” but not a complete verb (only the partial verb “shaking”). This phrase is an example of an absolute.
And there is this one, the one that causes most of the “dangling” problems, the participle phrase: Staggering down the hall, the crowd saw the drunken man making his way toward the exit.
“Staggering down the hall” is the phrase, but the meaning is not clear, or at least it is not as clear as it should be. Written this way, it seems as if the phrase “walking down the hall” applies to “the crowd.” And that is fine if it does, but it’s not likely that the crowd would be staggering down the hall. But if the phrase applies to “the drunken man” then it is necessary to write the sentence this way:
The crowd saw the drunken man staggering down the hall, weaving his way toward the exit.
That example is a case of ambiguity caused by poor phrase placement; it is not really a case of a dangling participial phrase. We call such things misplaced modifiers because they are modifiers that are misplaced. Isn’t English a wonderful language!
Now look at this example, lyrics from a John Prine song called, “I ain’t hurtin’ nobody.”
They go something like this: “…I was nine years old, listening to Little Richard sing “Tutti Fruitti” from the top of a telephone pole.”
The sense of this song (as if rock & roll songs had to make any sense) is that it was John, at nine, who was on the top of the pole. But the way it is written makes it seem that it was Little Richard who was on top of the pole. Given that Little Richard was something of a wild man, he still wouldn’t be performing on top of telephone pole.
The problem with misplaced modifiers is a simple one. Our minds (looking for the simplest solution) make the most obvious of connections. Proximity is the key. The phrase is connected to the nearest subject. In the case of the Prine song, the nearest subject to the participle phrase “listening to Little Richard sing ‘Tutti Fruitti’” is Little Richard not “I” [the singer, John Prine]. Hence there is confusion. The reader, or in this case the listener, must struggle to make sense of a sentence that should not have to be struggled with.
But what about the dangling modifiers? They don’t have any subject at all for the modifier to attach to, hence the term “dangling.” These modifiers just hang out on nothing at all.
Here are some examples:
Watching for mistakes with dangling modifiers, my essay got more and more difficult to write.
There is no subject for the participle phrase “Watching for mistakes with dangling modifiers” to attach to. The phrase refers to me, my act of writing, not “my essay.”
Wondering if I’ll ever have time to write another usage lesson, the doorbell rings and more people arrive to interrupt my typing this week’s lesson.
There is no subject in the sentence for the phrase “Wondering if I’ll ever have time to write another usage lesson” to attach itself to, certainly not “the doorbell.”
And here are some provided by a friend who collected them from her writing classes:
Spewing out clouds of black exhaust fumes, Lonnie checked the tail pipe.
While waiting for the plumber, the hot water tank began to leak all over the basement.
Feeling depressed, the romantic old movie made me cry.
The real lesson of this lesson: watch out for things that dangle (or get misplaced) and let your writing be seen but not obscene.
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