Misplaced Modifiers
As far as grammatical errors go, misplaced modifiers might yield the most humor. Consider Groucho Marx’s quip in the movie Animal Crackers: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.”
A modifier is any word or phrase that modifies, or describes, another word. Adjectives and adverbs are examples of single word modifiers, but entire phrases can also act as modifiers. Consider these sentences (the modifiers are in bold):
Use the sharpest knife. (sharpest describes/modifies the knife)
The snow was falling softly. (softly describes/modifies the way the snow was falling)
Ask the girl with the curly hair. (with the curly hair describes/modifies the girl)
The placement of modifiers affects the meaning of sentences. “We only ate two slices of pizza” is different from “We ate only two slices of pizza.” In the first example, only modifies what we ate: the two slices of pizza were all that we ate — no salad, no garlic knots, just pizza. In the second example, only modifies the word two — we didn’t have three or four slices of pizza. We stopped at two. In general, modifiers should be placed as close as possible to the words they modify to avoid confusion.
A dog caught my attention running through the park.
In this sentence, it’s not clear who is doing the running — me, or the dog. Was I jogging when I noticed the dog, or did the dog run by me while I was sitting on a park bench? To clear up the confusion, I could say either, “A dog caught my attention while I was running through the park” (if I was the one doing the running) or ” A dog running through the park caught my attention” (if the dog was the one who ran). Here’s another example:
Upon slamming the door, the vase fell from the table and shattered.
The wording of this sentence makes it sound as though the vase slammed the door, which seems fairly impossible. Remember: place modifiers as close as possible to the words they modify: “Upon slamming the door, I saw the vase fall from the table and shatter” or “When I slammed the door, the vase fell from the table and shattered. “ Either way, I need to make clear that I am the one who did the slamming.
Returning to our original example, when Groucho Marx wonders how the elephant got in his pajamas, he is playing on the misplaced modifier: “I shot an elephant in my pajamas.” We would assume that Groucho was the one wearing pajamas, but grammatically, the elephant was wearing them.
