The following sentence from the Atlantic’s online edition is confused and grammatically flawed—a serious case of a dangling modifier being made to illogically modify a wrong subject:
“Of the three North African countries at the heart of the popular uprisings that have riveted the world over the last several weeks, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi has always done the most to assert his country’s African identity, staking its prestige, its riches and his own personal influence above all on its place in the continent.”
But no, its subject shouldn’t be Libya but Muammar Qaddafi. The architecture of that sentence tells us that “Muammar Qadaffi,” not “Libya,” is what it wants to talk about. But the problem is that its author Howard French—or the editors of The Atlantic—mistook the possessive form “Libya’s” as the subject of that front-end modifying phrase. Sad to say, even professional writers and editors fall for this treacherous grammar error—thinking that the “apostrophe-s” possessive form remains a noun instead of the adjective that it has become. The fact is that in the possessive form “Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi,” the subject is “Muammar Qaddafi” and the word “Libya’s” is just a modifier, no longer able to function as a subject or object.
So shall we now fix that sentence by doing major grammatical surgery on both the front-end modifying phrase and the main clause? This, understandably, is what a conscientious writer or editor would immediately think of doing when he or she finds something terribly wrong with a sentence. But the surprising thing is that that troubled sentence from The Atlantic doesn’t need any major restructuring at all. Indeed, the culprit that caused all that trouble is just one ill-chosen word—the preposition “of” that starts off that front-end modifying phrase.
See what happens when we replace that “of” with “in”:
“In the three North African countries at the heart of the popular uprisings that have riveted the world over the last several weeks, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi has always done the most to assert his country's African identity, staking its prestige, its riches and his own personal influence above all on its place in the continent.”
With “in” introducing it, that front-end phrase properly becomes a modifier indicating location of the subject “Muammar Qaddafi” rather than an attribute or description of the proper noun “Libya,” which was the faulty sense created by the improper use of the preposition “of” in the original sentence.
The moral of the story here is, of course, that we should be judicious in using prepositions. Despite their unprepossessing size and heft, they can make an astoundingly breathtaking semantic difference in what a sentence says or fails to say.
