This looks like a good-to-very-good English grammar day for the major Metro Manila broadsheets! I have just finished going over the news, feature, and editorial content of three of them and on the whole, their English grammar and usage appear to be admirably airtight—except for two dangling modifying phrases in the same sentence in a lifestyle feature and a wrong word choice in another lifestyle feature, both in the same broadsheet; and a solitary misplaced modifying phrase in a sports column in another broadsheet.
IMAGE CREDIT: BRAINFALL.COMHere’s the passage with two dangling modifiers in the lifestyle section of the first broadsheet:
“One night in the city, with bottle of cold beer in hand, the theory hits me harder than 10 shots of tequila.”
And the lead sentence with a wrong word choice, also in the lifestyle section of that broadsheet:
“In its constant quest to provide the luxury watch market with better precision instruments,’ Swiss watchmaker [the brand] recently unveiled a new, exclusive movement dubbed as Caliber B01.”
The sports column in the other broadsheet has this lead sentence that’s spoiled by modifier misplacement:
“When the FIBA special commission decided to uphold the SBP’s authority to govern basketball in the country as a federation affiliate and NSA in Geneva the other day, the sport’s major stakeholders heaved a sigh of relief.”
MY CRITIQUE AND SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS:1. First broadsheet: Dangling modifier in a lifestyle story“
One night in the city,
with bottle of cold beer in hand, the theory
hits me harder than 10 shots of tequila.”
We can probably forgive the wrong use of the present tense “hits” in that sentence—it should be in the past tense but it’s likely only a proofreading error—but I dare say that “one night in the city” and “with bottle of cold beer in hand” are both dangling modifying phrases.
Why?
It’s because both are up front in the sentence and none seems to be modifying any word in that sentence. To begin with, even if any of them does by a stretch, it’s preposterous to think of the noun “city” being modified by the phrase “with bottle of cold beer in hand” (cities don’t nurse a beer, only humans do!) and as preposterous to think of the noun “theory” being modified by that same phrase (theories don’t drink beer either!). And neither would the pronoun “me” in the main clause qualify as the subject of those two modifying phrases, for “me” is in the objective case and can’t be modified by them. In fact, there’s no noun at all in that sentence that can be modified by those two phrases; in other words, that sentence is actually a double dangler!
We will recall that a dangling modifier is usually a phrase that modifies a word not clearly stated in the sentence, and is often—but not always—located at the beginning of a sentence. Also, a dangling modifier usually functions as an adjective but is unable to clearly modify a particular word in the sentence or, in the worst case, it ends up modifying the wrong word.
Indeed, nothing less than a total rewrite of the sentence in question here is needed to grammatically and logically connect the ideas in those two dangling modifiers to their proper subject. Central to a successful rewrite is, of course, a construction that would convert the objective pronoun “me” into its subjective form “I” so it can become a legitimate subject of the modifying phrases in question.
Here’s a first attempt to remove those two danglers:
“
One night in the city,
with bottle of cold beer in hand,
I was hit by a theory that struck me harder than 10 shots of tequila.”
Here, by making the first-person pronoun “I” as the subject of the main clause, we are able to produce a proper subject that’s legitimately modifiable by the modifying phrase “with bottle of cold beer in hand” and, by logical extension, also by the adverbial phrase “one night in the city.”
The problem with that reconstruction, though, is that while it supplies a proper subject to the main clause and gets rid of the two danglers, it forces the main clause to take the passive voice and makes the sentence sound stilted in the process. Worse, like the original sentence, that sentence construction doesn’t make clear where the theory came from, and it unnaturally requires using a synonym of “hit”—“struck” or some such verb (perhaps even “hit” again)—to deliver the description of the theory’s striking action.
I think we can safely presume that the theory didn’t simply come from nowhere in the darkness of that night but from the mind of the writer himself. With that presumption, we can put the main clause of the sentence in the active voice and come up with this smoother, more elegant construction:
“
One night in the city,
with bottle of cold beer in hand,
I came up with a theory that hit me harder than 10 shots of tequila.”
2. First broadsheet: Wrong word choice in a lifestyle story“In its
constant quest to provide the luxury watch market with better precision instruments,’ Swiss watchmaker [the brand] recently unveiled a new, exclusive movement dubbed as Caliber B01.”
I think most of you will agree with me that the adjective “constant” is improperly used to modify “quest” in that sentence. By definition, “constant” means “marked by firm steadfast resolution or faithfulness,” as in “a constant friend” and—if I may use the title of a movie—
A Constant Gardener; and it could also mean “invariable, uniform” or “continually occurring or recurring,” as in “a constant flow” and “a constant revolution.” I don’t think any of these denotations of “constant” properly applies to the noun “quest” in its sense of “an act or instance of seeking.”
More properly, I think, we should be using the adjective “continuing” instead of “constant” to modify actions like “quest,” which in real life is actually pursued off and on and—unlike the rotation of our planet and the revolution of the sun—doesn’t continually occur or recur.
I thus strongly recommend using “continuing” instead to modify “quest” in that sentence:
“In its
continuing quest to provide the luxury watch market with better precision instruments,’ Swiss watchmaker [the brand] recently unveiled a new, exclusive movement dubbed as Caliber B01.”
3. Second broadsheet: Misplaced modifier in sports column“When the FIBA special commission decided to uphold the SBP’s authority to govern basketball in the country as a federation affiliate and NSA
in Geneva the other day, the sport’s major stakeholders heaved a sigh of relief.”
After reading this lead sentence, I had to blink my eyes several times before I could figure out what role the phrase “in Geneva the other day” was playing in the scheme of things of that sentence. Was that phrase supposed to modify the noun phrase “as a federation affiliate and NSA,” or was the phrase “the other day” meant to modify only the phrase “NSA in Geneva”? Whatever the author really wanted to say in that lead sentence, it was certainly lost in the sentence construction.
I have since reread that problematic sentence several times and I have come to the conclusion that “in Geneva the other day” is actually a badly misplaced modifying phrase, thus causing my bafflement. Remember now that a misplaced modifying phrase is a group of words positioned or attached to the sentence in the wrong place, or is not placed near enough to the word it’s supposed to modify, so it ends up modifying the wrong word. In this case, “in Geneva the other day” has ended up modifying “a federation affiliate and NSA,” which of course doesn’t make much sense.
Now see what happens when we reposition “in Geneva the other day” in what I think is its proper place in that sentence:
“When the FIBA special commission decided
in Geneva the other day to uphold the SBP’s authority to govern basketball in the country as a federation affiliate and NSA, the sport’s major stakeholders heaved a sigh of relief.”
Suddenly everything in the sentence seems to have settled in its rightful place—grammar, semantics, logic, and all!
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