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Dangling Participles. Don't Leave 'Em Hanging.

So what is a participle, you ask, and how can it possibly dangle? To answer that question, let's flash back to high school English class, where we all had to learn grammatical terms and how to diagram sentences. Apparently, a participle is an adjective that used to be a verb. Who knew?

For instance, consider the sentence: "The dangling timepiece swung like a pendulum, making him drowsy."

Here, "dangle" (a verb) becomes "dangling" (an adjective) to modify/describe the noun "timepiece." BUT because "dangling" is a verb-adjective blend, it is now called a "participle." No one ever said grammar made sense, but hopefully you're getting the picture.

Now, the definition of a "dangling participle" is when the participle modifies or describes the wrong noun, therefore causing confusion, or at the very least, humor where it was not intended. There's a well-known Internet email highlighting grammatical errors from English church bulletins. It has circulated for years, and it's filled with dangling participles.

One such example is: "Miss Charlene Mason sang 'I will not pass this way again,' giving obvious pleasure to the congregation."

Funny, yes; grammatically correct, no. The sentence should instead read, "Giving obvious pleasure to the congregation, Miss Charlene Mason sang, 'I will not pass this way again.'" That's assuming, of course, that the congregation was not trying to boot Miss Mason out of the church.

Another example of a dangling participle is the sentence: "Boiling on the stove, Ted moved the pot to another burner."

Poor Ted; that sounds painful. He would probably prefer the sentence to instead read, "Ted moved the pot boiling on the stove to another burner."

See? There we have the story of the dangling participle. The moral, of course, is to always ensure the participles in your sentences modify what you intend, and never what you don't. You don't want to leave 'em hanging. Otherwise, mass confusion, and perhaps even a few giggles, might erupt.