Support the Timberjay by making a donation.

Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Modifiers in need of modification...

Catie Clark
Posted 8/1/24

In the old comedy film “Animal Crackers,” Groucho Marx famously declares: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” Groucho …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Modifiers in need of modification...

Posted

In the old comedy film “Animal Crackers,” Groucho Marx famously declares: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.”
Groucho should be the poster child for the misplaced modifier, which is English grammar’s gift to the world of humor. For example, few would refrain from a good laugh after reading: “Cecilia received a flyer about a workshop on making a canoe from an Ojibwe tribal elder.”
The issues wrapped up in the above sentence are immense. First, I would want to alert local law enforcement about the senior abuse and the potential felony threat of physical violence. A charge of attempted murder may also be in the offing. The possibility of human trafficking cannot be discarded.
Horrific mayhem is looming at Cecilia’s future canoe workshop, all because of a misplaced prepositional phrase. “From an Ojibwe tribal elder” looks like it modifies the gerund phrase “making a canoe.” In reality, the prepositional phrase is adverbial and modifies the verb “received.” The grammatical fix is to move the phrase closer to the thing it modifies, but that’s not as fun as just laughing at the metaphorical foot in the mouth presented by this sentence.
Now consider the following dangling modifier: “Upon entering the dentist’s office, a five-foot-tall wooden molar caught my attention.” When reading a sentence like that, all I can think of is the giant wooden tooth at an Ely dentist’s office as it waves at people after it walks into the waiting room. The opening clause is dangling because it has nothing to modify. The clause doesn’t modify “molar” or “attention;” it wants to modify the narrator, who is absent from the sentence.
Despite my own awareness of misplaced and dangling modifiers, I am not immune from making my own modifier mistakes. In a commentary I haven’t finished yet about Ely’s music scene, my first draft harbors this guilty sentence: “After gathering dust for 25 years, I finally had time to play my bass trombone.”
Sentences like this bring home how transformative writing can be as a vehicle for self-revelation. After all, it was an epiphany to discover I had 25 years of dust on me, and I found this out only after taking up the base trombone again.
Some misplaced modifier mistakes are hard to catch. One sentence that comes to mind is, “Ely Memorial High School students got to meet the cast of ‘Disney’s Frozen, the Broadway Musical’ on a field trip to Milwaukee.” See the problem? It’s similar to the first sentence on the canoe workshop. As the sentence is currently written, it’s the cast of the musical that’s on the field trip to Milwaukee, not the students.
Some bad modifiers need no introduction.
 “Applications are now being accepted for infant day care workers.”
 “Law enforcement chased the bear in a squad car.”
 “Michelle read the note taped to the wall.”
 “After their death, my family took the plants outside.”
 “I saw an accident walking down the street.”
 “After drinking too much, the toilet kept swaying.”
 “A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.”