Stan Carey at Sentence first:
On many vexed matters of English usage, people can be divided into the following groups:
1. those who neither know nor care
2. those who do not know, but care very much
3. those who know and condemn
4. those who know and approve
5. those who know and distinguish.
Thus with wry wit did H. W. Fowler address the existence of split infinitives in his landmark usage dictionary of 1926. He concluded that the first group ‘are the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of the minority classes’.
Even more people are happily unaware of dangling or misplaced modifiers. I mean this kind of thing: Cycling downhill, a truck almost hit me. The writer was cycling, but the grammar implies, absurdly, that the truck was. Or: Born in India, Diya’s education took her to Europe. Diya was born in India, but the line says her education was.
As a copy-editor I’m in category 5: I routinely edit danglers to accord with the norms of formal written English. But they’re not always a flagrant error, and they’ve occurred in English since at least Chaucer’s day.
Let’s take a closer look.
More here.
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