Excuse me, your dangling participle is showing!

I'm still on English language issues, at least for the first part of this posting.

A common error among speakers and writers of English is the "sin" of the dangling participle, also known as the dangling modifier. I shall try to keep the grammatical explanation as simple as possible (you can Google for the full works).

Simply put, a dangling modifier is a descriptive word or phrase (usually at the beginning of a sentence) that modifies a noun-word or noun-phrase that does not appear in the sentence. This leads to an unintended and often humorous meaning. As noted by Richard Nordquist, professor emeritus of rhetoric and English, one way to correct a dangling modifier is to add a noun phrase that the modifier can logically describe. Or, make the modifier part of a dependent clause.

Here's one example provided by American educationist Dr Kip Wheeler:

Running for the school bus, my book fell in the mud.

My book can run? This is easily fixed: Running for the school bus, I tripped and my book fell in the mud.

Or...
As I was running for the school bus, my book fell in the mud.

My own favourite example of such a "sin" is this one about a blacksmith telling his apprentice to help him shoe a horse after the nail has been gingerly poised above the horse-shoe:

When I nod my head, hit it with the hammer.

Ouch! To make the modifier properly describe the second part of the sentence, the entire sentence should be recast as:

When I nod my head, (you) hit the nail with the hammer.

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Okay, time for some comic relief. As always, insing.com to the rescue...

I had earlier posted something on a crazy stunt called "planking". Several other stunts have followed, such as "balconying" and "owling". The latest, it seems, is "batmanning". Here's the story:

http://news.insing.com/tabloid/new-internet-craze-batmanning/id-87a23e00

This other one I hesitated before deciding to put it here. But it is so weird and tit-ilating at the same time that I will do so, just for a lark:

http://news.insing.com/tabloid/one-man-s-quest-to-grope-1-000-women/id-7ea23e00

I like the postscript at the end of the report: "inSing editors would like to warn all the men out there -- don't try this in Singapore!"