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grammar topple with them.
Not many readers may be equipped to explain precisely the rule against a dangling participial clause, but readers know one when they see one. Some months ago a dozen readers in Ohio sent me the same account of a women’s golf tournament in which Deb Richard had a tough time on the 18th hole. An AP sportswriter explained: “Rated the easiet hole on the course, Richard found the fairway bunker both times she played it.”
In the same fashion, The Boston Globe in September carried a travel feature on Hong Kong: “Walking up Queen’s Road Central. The Central Market is worth poking into.”
Well, Miss Richard is not the easiest hole on the course, and the Central Market is not walking up the Queen’s Road. Such clumsy errors in syntax may not offend against meaning, but they surely offend against order.
Mind you, I am not contending that the rules of grammar are immutable. Over the past century we have seen a steady erosion of old rules on “whom.” The distinction between “can” and “may” gets blurred. The subjunctive mood may not be dead, but it’s dying. In the first-person future, “shall” steadilv vields to “will.”
Very well. Eventually such changes will be so widely accepted that they will constitute a new order of good taste and general acceptability. Until then, we ought to hold on tiuht to the inheritance we have.
COPYRIGHT 1993
UNIVERSAL PRESS
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