The Grammar Grouch has been so busy lately venting his spleen on our sorry excuse for a president and a GOP Congress afraid to counter him that the grousing over grammar has been put on the back burner to simmer. Alas, a spate of miscues in the Grouch’s local news organ has aroused him from his grammatical The two salient errors were related to syntax, i.e., sentence or phrase structure. One was a dangling modifier, or misplaced modifier, or whatever you want to call it. The

Preventive Gerontologist, Dr. Arnold Bretsky, recommends this … That’s the beginning of a sentence from a newspaper advertorial urging people to use a certain brain supplement. Perhaps the person who wrote it ought to practice what he or she preaches. Or take a course in English grammar. Of course, to err is human. However, to err over and over, which happens in this piece, is ignorance. It may be bliss, but it ain’t happenstance. What’s wrong with that sentence fragment? Let

Call them murdered modifiers, muddied modifiers, massacred modifiers – or, perhaps most accurate, misunderstood modifiers. They all describe those danged dangling modifiers. Doing the twist Creating them is easy: Just twist the syntax out of shape. You don’t even have to try. In fact, that’s how they come about. It’s called carelessness – better yet, mindlessness. How else would yours truly have succeeded in formulating so many over the years, before he learned how to screw h