and i'm hungry like the wooooooolf

[tears_of_nienna]

College Bowl quote of the night: "You know, if everything's positioned correctly, nothing should be dangling."

I was talking about participles, people. Participles.

...Although that is one of the highlights of my college experience, right there.

This paper would be a lot easier to write if I didn't keep typing "Duke of Gloucester" as "Duck of

Comments

[brokenbacktango]

That's Rodrigo Santoro?! Holy shit, dude.

[tears_of_nienna]

Dude, yeah. I wouldn't have known it was him if I hadn't seen him on a making-of bit this evening. In the interview he had hair, though, so it was a definite improvement.

...Who am I kidding? I can already tell that by the end of the movie I am going to be inappropriately attracted to Xerxes. *sigh*

[squeeful]

You know, I could be really uber geeky and point out that the whole "no dangling participles" rule comes from the same school of thought (and possibly the same scholar) as "do not split infinitives". That is, the "try and make English more like Latin" idea, conveniently forgetting that English is not a Romance language. In Anglo-Saxon and Middle English you can split your infinitives and dangle your participles all you want.

[tears_of_nienna]

I'm totally on board with the idea of splitting infinitives, but I think the dangling participle thing can actually screw up the meaning of a sentence. I'm not sure how to properly explain myself, though. If I said--

Fluttering gently, the butterfly was caught by the man

the meaning is a little bit different from--

Fluttering gently, the man caught the butterfly.

I think I dangled the participle (im)properly in the second one.

At any rate, I'm sticking with the dangling-participle rule for the same reason I cling desperately to the Oxford comma: it makes things easier to understand, and in this language we need all the help we can get. ;)

[squeeful]

That's passive voice. Modern writing frowns on it (as does that stupid Word paperclip) but I think it's all right.

[tears_of_nienna]

Modern academic writing does, at least. I love using it in fiction, though, especially if I'm writing Tolkien fic. Archaic narrative voice FTW!

...Even though it is passive voice, it holds true as an example. The main clauses still say the same thing, but the modifier gets assigned differently by the reader. I think? Arg, it's too early for grammar. ;)