As someone firmly on the Left...

Dangling modifiers are one of those 'grammar' things that children learn about, writers are warned about, and peevers peeve about. Strunk and White give this one:

Being in a dilapidated condition, I was able to buy the house very cheap.

They're also one of those grammar things, like so many of these peeves, that actually don't usually matter much. It's nearly always clear from the context what is meant, and maybe the sentence would be neater if it was changed, but not always. The one above is corrected to 'Being in a dilapidated condition, the house was for sale very cheap' which is fine too, but I don't think there's much in it, readability-wise.

So it was quite exciting to find one that actually does matter:

As someone firmly on the Left, Jeremy Corbyn would be a truly terrible Prime Minister, even in comparison to the appalling one currently at No. 10.

— Mary • Pronouns: Hufflepuff/Esquire ❤️🐱🏁🕷 (@MaryMinifieEsq) October 26, 2019

The dangling modifier here is 'as someone firmly on the left'. It can refer to the speaker, as these modifiers often do, or it could refer to Jeremy Corbyn, the closest referent. This is the interpretation that style guides would say is 'correct'. But both are plausible, which is why we can't disambiguate with context here. The two different meanings are as follows:

I am someone firmly on the Left, but I still think that Jeremy Corbyn would be a terrible Prime Minister. 

Because Jeremy Corbyn is firmly on the Left, I think he would be a terrible Prime Minister.  

I actually don't know which is the intended meaning, as I don't know the person who tweeted it. Probably the first is more likely given the audience and tweet it responds to, but who knows. A rare genuine case for writing out the dangling modifier.

Trump and sensitive editing

Trump (who I don't blog about much because I don't think it's helpful to criticise his poor command of language when he is so unbelievably awful in so many other more important ways) has been mocked on twitter again. He used the phrase [they] pour over my tweets rather than pore over. This is a very common mistake; lots of perfectly intelligent people also make it; it's not transparent enough for it to be a thing you could work out. You just either know it or you don't. In most uses, pore is a little hole for your skin to breathe through, so it's not obvious why it should mean 'gaze intently', and in fact we don't know where that meaning comes from - we just have it recorded in early English writing and without a known origin. So I'm not going to beat Trump up for not knowing that, but the internet did. The problem was that he used it in a tweet where he explicitly said how good his written English was, and a version of Muphry's Law states that if you write anything praising your accurate writing, there'll be an error in it.

So let's look at this positively. Lot's of people just corrected the spelling of pore, others pointed out other less-than-brilliant aspects of the writing in the original tweet, but this person, a writer himself, edited the tweet to read much better:

“Having written many best-selling books and somewhat priding myself on my writing ability, it should be noted that the fake news likes to constantly pore over my tweets looking for mistakes. I capitalize certain words for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized.”

There
FIFY pic.twitter.com/M9wi9u1CkJ

— michaelharriot (@michaelharriot) July 3, 2018

There's a commonly-criticised error in the original tweet, which Michael hasn't fixed: the dangling participle(s) at the beginning. Normally, people are keen to point out the comedy of such constructions (Plunging hundreds of feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls). But in this case, it's fine: the potential confound is it, which is what we call an expletive, which means that it doesn't mean anything so you can't accidentally interpret the modifier as modifying it. And it sets up the context for the rest of the tweet nicely, so it's a perfectly acceptable construction.

Secondly, Michael has actually introduced a split infinitive (to constantly pore). I'm a big fan of these, especially if they make a sentence read better, which they often do, and which it definitely does in this case. It's not the liking that's constant, it's the poring, and the rhythm is also nicer in my opinion.

I like this sensitive editing with attention paid to how the tweet sounds and no rigid adherence to the rules given that it is a tweet. If you're an editor for a newspaper whose style guide says no split infinitives, then you must remove all split infinitives and that's it. But if you do have a choice, then it's good to be able to use them where it improves a thing.