Some of you (the luckier ones) might have read No. 35, Don't Let Your Participle Dangle in my series of articles titled Really Easy Grammar. If not, it's included later on in this newsletter. It came to mind again recently on a flight back from London when I was reading the Daily Telegraph. Usually, except for the odd term that's not familiar, I get along pretty well with British English. An exception was an article in the same paper that talked about some comments made by the Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver, who was quoted as describing people as "t***ers and ar*****es." I know a bit of English scatology, but neither of those meant a thing to me. Sadly, it's not the sort of information one normally tries to get from a flight attendant. So, when I got home, I went immediately to the Web to discover that t***ers are tossers or people who masturbate and ar*****es are arseholes or what we call assholes. As a side note, the Brits are more accurate than we in this case. Technically, an ass is an animal while an arse is a posterior. We just use ass for both.

What caught me eye, though, in the area of dangling modifiers was the sentence in the obit for Sir John Johnston, "one of the Queen's most popular courtiers." In a listing of war duties of his military command in WWII, the paper says, "Equipped with Churchill tanks, it spent a year training for the D-Day landings in various parts of England." As most of us know who remember D-Day, there were no landings in various places in England, or any places in England, for that matter. All the landings were in France.

This is a prime example of why the rules about dangling participles is one that should be followed. In some cases, as in shooting an elephant in my pajamas, it's only a possibly amusing twist. In others, as in the case quoted here, it can actually change the meaning and intent of the sentence. It's not hard to imagine a time some hundreds of years in the future when a determined scholar of mid-Twentieth Century history wants to use this genuine newspaper article in a citation that appears to prove his thesis that England actually had been invaded during WWII.

So, our common language suffers from the same problems on both side of the Pond as was proved to me one evening in a pub when I corrected a bloke's grammar and asked him, "Don't you know the Queen's English?" He replied, "Course she is, mate. What would she be then?"

Bill Moore
http://www.WriteRiteRight.com