WOES OF MISPLACED PHRASES

My Cedar Rapids friend Madeline Morrin raises a question about beginning a sentence with a participial phrase. I know of no rule regarding this construction, but many speakers and writers are guilty of dangling opening phrases. Or else the dangles wind up modifying the wrong referent.

Sonya Friedman, who unwittingly provides so much material for these columns, commits this offense often when interviewing guests on her talk show. "Having said this," she is likely to begin, "some callers may not agree with you." The callers are not the ones who have spoken; "Having said this" refers to the guest.

CNN's popular talk show host, however, is not alone in committing this solecism. According to an AP review, the well-known novelist Norman Mailer dangles participles as a matter of course. In the very first sentence of his new 1,307-page novel, Harlot's Ghost, he wrote: "On a late winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist ..."

Mailer's critic nominated this "good reading, bad grammar." The critic was off base too. The problem was in structure, not grammar. It wasn't the recollections that were driving, it was the author; but his grammar was flawless.

Misplaced phrases pervade the entire communications field, with writers for syndicates contributing their fair share. Recent among these was an AP condensation referring to the joint army proposed by France and Germany: "France and Germany outlined their plans to create a Strasbourg-based corps with up to 50,000 men in a letter to Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Luubers, whose nations hold the EC's rotating presidency."

Question: How will the two countries ever get 50,000 men into a letter? A comma after "men" would have clarified the statement, and perhaps the omission was not the fault of the writer. At least it stimulated our imagination, giving us something to smile about.

Reporting on a robbery some distance from our city, a TV staffer announced: "The man made off an undetermined amount of money, which was arrested in less than an hour." What did the man make off the money or did he make off with it? Was it the money that was arrested, or the robber? A person is a who, never a which.

Speaking of the benefits derived from reading certain comics, a lady networker explained: "It hides the guys of being sensitive about their bodies." Mercy me! Was the lady so sensitive about her body that she was unable to express herself on the subject? She was trying to say that most people hate to see a doctor because they are embarrassed about their bodily imperfections, and the comics help them laugh about their flaws. Let us add that we'd prefer the comics to another Demi Moore. Certain things in life are still private, or should be, and we were not amused.

Some weeks ago, in a feature in Time magazine about Johnny Clegg, we read: "A young man walked up to a man on the sidewalk that was playing a guitar." I'd never thought of sidewalks as being musically inclined, but a peregrinating pedestrian of my acquaintance tells me the bulges in our city sidewalks suggest that the sidewalks have been practicing hard rock and heavy metal. Does our City Council know the score?

Reviews of Alexandra Ripley's sequel to Gone with the Wind Scarlett have been uniformly unfavorable, but my friend Esther has sent one that bears noting. Writing in the Florida Times Union, columnist Ann Hyman of Knight-Tribune Services conceded: "She's a competent writer. Consider this deft sentence or two that is included in an account of a get-together among the O'Haras, the Cades, the Fontaines a decade after the war."

How competent or deft is a reviewer who promises "a sentence or two" and neglects to add a second sentence, or to reconsider the one she's written?