Dangling and Dangerous Modifiers

Why an obscure rule of grammar could land you in a libel suit - and how to make sure that never happens.

This is an issue which crops up surprisingly often, not only with my students, but in books and the media. My original post about it came about from a real-life example, courtesy of the BBC News about the Sochi Olympics:

• After falling in the practice and suffering concussion, British Team officials say Smith* may not compete.

And no, it wasn’t the officials who were whisked off for skull x-rays.

It’s not hard to illustrate how this pretty normal piece of grammar can go gloriously wrong. To many of us, what’s wrong here is very obvious:

• Over 4000 years old, the Queen enjoyed her walk around the ruins.

• Elaborately frilled and tucked, why should I give my horrible family the best bed linen?

So what’s going on?

The usual name for this particular problem is the ‘dangling modifier’ - though the biggest subset of them can be labelled ‘dangling participles’, because very often the modifying job is being done by those -ed and -ing verb forms.

Let’s look at how it works in practice.