There it was on public radio — bad grammar!
“As a middle schooler, there was always one channel I wanted to watch — TCM, the Turner Classic Movies channel,” the host said at the opening of an episode of “This American Life.”
I’m a fan of old movies too, so I appreciated the sentiment. But that sentence contained what grammarians call a dangling modifier.
The idea is that a descriptive phrase without a subject, like “As a middle schooler,” has to refer to the subject of the main clause. A sentence like “Caring deeply about her children, the quality of the schools concerned my mother” makes it seem as if the quality of the schools was what did the caring. We are supposed to say, “Caring deeply about her children, my mother was concerned about the quality of the schools.”
Therefore, the radio host should have said, “As a middle schooler, I always wanted to watch one channel …”
Except, the host’s choice of words was a natural way of speaking. We don’t need to be training people to look down upon perfectly comprehensible speech.
There are times when the dangling modifier rule makes sense, when a dangler makes a sentence awkward or unclear, like “After fighting the fire for three hours, the ship sank in flames.” Add a subject to the modifier: “After firefighters battled the fire for three hours, the ship sank in flames.” Or “Not having studied the lab manual carefully, the experiment was a failure,” which makes it sound as if the experiment hadn’t studied. Better to say, “Not having studied the lab manual carefully, they failed in their experiment.”
But the dangling modifier rule has fossilized into a kind of fetish less about clarity than recreational pickiness. William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s “The Elements of Style” lays down the fiat that “A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.” According to R.W. Burchfield’s revision of Henry Watson Fowler’s “Modern English Usage,” “It must be admitted that unattached participles” — i.e., dangling modifiers — “seldom lead to ambiguity. They just jar.”
But do they always? Context plays a significant role in communication. As long as there is no ambiguity, I am not the least bit jarred by a sentence like “As a middle schooler, there was always one channel I wanted to watch — TCM, the Turner Classic Movies channel.”
Why should we rigidly follow a rule and rephrase a sentence if there’s no ambiguity?
We don’t need to play a gotcha game dressed up as a grammar rule. There are clearly dangling modifiers that would bother no one. “Speaking of the weather, tomorrow Kelly will need new boots.” No one would think this sentence is about Kelly speaking of the weather. My linguist colleague Geoffrey Pullum is especially lucid on not getting worked up about dangling modifiers that “don’t make the reader do a double take, or half-seduce the reader for a moment into some crazy interpretation.”
And just as you might not know your family was dysfunctional until you spend time with a stable one, you see the illogic of English on this point once you look at how other languages deal with it.
A Dutch academic colleague told me he had never heard that it was wrong to say something like “Walking home from the hotel, a thought occurred to me.” The meaning is clear, he said. In Mandarin, when you say, “Walking up the hill, flowers bloom,” it is readily understood that you mean that you see the flowers blooming, not that the flowers are walking up the hill. Why must Anglophones pretend that context doesn’t matter?
As technology elevates images over words, writing substantial text will be ever more marginalized, even without A.I. This is a time when we need to sweep away linguistic cobwebs, like grammar rules that serve no purpose. It requires people to know a password to gain entrance into respectability, one of the last permissible outlets for classism.
By the way, there is a key new biography of the Broadway composer I most wanted to listen to — Stephen Sondheim. It’s Daniel Okrent’s crisp entry in the Jewish Lives series, “Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy.” I have had the same conversation with three musical theater fan friends, where we started out wondering what else we needed to know about Sondheim but found Okrent’s book a marvelous feast full of new insights. And if you’re a newbie, Okrent’s book is a great place to begin. As Noël Coward put it in his delightful “I Went to a Marvelous Party,” I couldn’t have liked it more. Hear Patricia Routledge perform it.
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