Comments on: Name that grammatical error

By: JamesG

JamesG — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:43:34 +0000

My favorite quote on grammar questions: Whom cares?

By: Charles Pergiel

Charles Pergiel — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 05:47:37 +0000

A Muslim University without a Burqas!?! I am shocked, I tell you! Absolutely shocked!

By: Lee

Lee — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 23:14:33 +0000

My first response to the grammar question is to say that, because of the need for brevity, headlines have a grammar of their own. But regardless of that, I think the headline is perfectly OK, in the same way that Practicing law without license is OK. Just as everyone would understand that without a license modifies not law but practicing law, so everyone understands that without burqa modifies not Muslim university but teaching at Muslim university. I doubt that anyone would object to the headline Lawyer Sanctioned for Practicing Law without License. Even if the headline was ungrammatical, I would call the problem a "misplaced modifier" rather than a "dangling modifier." IIRC, the latter would suggest that the noun or noun phrase being modified is missing entirely from the headline, which is not the case here.

By: William Sjostrom

William Sjostrom — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:43:09 +0000

$10,000 per class. Wow. That may get a lot of adjuncts rethinking the traditional academic hostility to Catholicism.

By: Erin O'Connor

Erin O'Connor — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:20:28 +0000

Michael, you are more forgiving than I am! The issue is indeed the dangling modifier. You make a good case for it not being an issue — but my own sense is that it only gets to not be an issue if the person who wrote it went through the reasoning process you outlined. In other words, the author should not be surprised to discover that he or she has asked the reader to picture universities as entities capable of wearing burqas. My hunch is that there would be some surprise involved….

By: Michael E. Lopez

Michael E. Lopez — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:11:43 +0000

Hmmm. I actually don’t see it. I mean, “From” is capitalized and probably shouldn’t be, but that can’t be what you’ve taken the time to post about. The only other thing I can even imagine that is problematic (other than the article-free stiltedness of headline language in general) is the location (and thus scope) of the prepositional phrase “Without Burqa”.

The University, after all, probably isn’t supposed to be taken as being without its burqa. It should probably be “Teaching Without Burqa” instead.

Five years ago I probably would have found this irritating, too. But ever since I took Latin I’ve been a lot more tolerant of misplaced clauses — after all, isn’t half the fun of reading figuring out to which noun the ablative applies? And it seems reasonable to consider “Teaching at Muslim University” to be a single gerund/noun phrase that can be modified by “Without Burqa.”

But it’s *so* reasonable that, confessing my ignorance, this, too seems like it probably isn’t what you had in mind. So I’m stumped.

But I’m a lawyer and a philosopher, not a Cleric of the Church of Grammar.