A Letter of Variable Interest

Wow, check this out: the President of RBC Global Asset Management is writing to me!

As much as I hate to get all red-pencil pedantic with my new pen pal , I think there are few hiccups here.

The opening sentence begins:

As a valued client, we are pleased to offer you...

So who's the valued client here? Once again, our syntactical orientation is discombobulated by a fiendish dangler. (What's a dangler and why does it hurt to get smacked with one? I refer you here, here, and here.)

On to the next sentence:

Many clients prefer to view their reports online, however, we will continue to mail printed copies to those clients who request them.

The marriage of those two sentences is even more awkward and grotesque than the Julia Roberts-Lyle Lovett coupling. Here's a nickel, Mr. President. Go buy yourself a period.

Next sentence:

If you wish to receive a printed copy of the reports, for the funds you currently invest in, please complete the detachable postage-paid reply card...

I don't know where that superfluous first comma wandered in from, but I'll bet I'm paying for it with some kind of service charge or another.

But perhaps the most conspicuous--and most mirth-giving--error occurs right up front with the salutation:

Dear Investor

I mean, really. My "investments" consist of a flaccid retirement account that is propped up by monthly contributions from my empty wine bottle redemptions. Which makes me an "investor" the same way my three-year-old's Easy-Bake Oven makes him a chef.

Copy-Editing the Neighborhood

I can't blame these local merchants for not wanting their allotment of customer parking to be hijacked by those smelly construction goons who are erecting the first monolithic apartment tower in our cozy little 'burb...

...and we can even chalk up the missing apostrophe in "owners" and the unorthodox spelling, "expence", to the heat of the moment. But "Lyons Park"? The reader of this sign need only swivel his or her noggin 90 degrees to the left to see this:

Swiveling my perplexed noggin 90 degrees in the other direction, I see the Thai restaurant that Kim and I Grouponed our way into a few weeks ago. Alas, that evening was over before it began when our dinner guest, Professor Stephen Hawking, saw this sign at the maitre d's podium...

...gave a synthesized grunt of dismay, and swung a deftly executed, motorized U-ee. We were, as you can imagine, mortified.

Continuing into the north side of PoCo (which you really shouldn't do--we star-bellied Sneetches tend to stick to the south side), we find this sign in the window of what was formerly a Rogers Video location:

Here's a handy tip about spotting danglers; if you stop reading shortly after the first comma, the game is up. In other words, if you just read "As a valued customer, we..." you instantly see the problem. This Rogers outlet is not a valued customer. Hell, they're obviously not even a valued retailer, given the forlorn state of these premises and the fact that video stores in general are becoming about as relevant as blacksmiths in today's commercial landscape.

Let's ponder that over an over-priced coffee, shall we? There's a Starbucks just a couple of blocks away from home we can go to (although I suppose by now the name "Starbucks" implicitly includes the phrase "a couple of blocks away"). It's still light out, not even crepuscular*, and yet we can still enter through this door, despite what the sign says:

Why? Because the sign doesn't make any sense, does it? Why lock the doors of the alternate back entrance during daylight hours, only to open them under cover of darkness, when undesirables from the north side could be lurking? Clearly, they have their dawn and dusk transposed.  But the sign has been there since video stores were popular and nobody seems to have noticed. I just consider it part of our small town charm.

*Crepuscular : "of or relating to twilight." Despite my wife's objections (she thinks it's an ugly word) I think this is a great word to wedge into everyday conversation. "I don't feel like watching The Twilight Zone tonight, dear. I find it too crepuscular."

The Atlantic Announces its Own Passing

Time for more dangling modifier unintentional humor. Today, the (formerly) venerable Atlantic slips on an old syntactical banana peel with this Table of Contents blooper in their online edition:

Letters from Stalin’s Daughter: 
Before dying Monday at 85, The Atlantic reviewed her 1967 memoir, "wrung from an agonized conscience"

But of course as regrettably moribund as the (formerly) venerable Atlantic may have been (and is), it did not die last Monday. If it had, we would not be reading this amusingly amateurish subheading.

Is This a Dangler I See Before Me?

This morning's Province brings us a dangler which, while not quite on a par with the classic "President Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while riding to Pennsylvania on an envelope," is still a good example of the mix-ups that can occur when a supporting clause wanders too far from its subject.

The story is about former Vancouver Canuck fan favorite Brendan Morrison coming back to the team for a tryout. As Jason Botchford reports:

In a battle with about seven players for one or two jobs, head coach Alain Vigneault said Morrison has a leg up on his competition for a couple of reasons.

That should read: "In a battle with about seven players for one or two jobs, Morrison blah blah blah..., according to head coach Alain Vigneault." As it stands, the juxtaposition of that opening clause with the subject "head coach Alain Vigneault" makes it sound as if it's Coach V who is battling for a job (and if he doesn't deliver a Stanley Cup this season that could yet be the case).

There's a Lot at Steak Here

Last night I was reading a selection from Ruth Reichl's book, "Garlic and Sapphires," about her experiences as the New York Times restaurant critic who dined in disguise to find out how the top restaurants treated a diner who was not the New York Times restaurant critic.

In the passage in question, she is talking about her humiliation at being called out in "the greenies"--the Times's in-house daily critique--for writing the sentence: "If you are a native New Yorker, steak is in your blood."

"The word police pounced," she writes.

"There, circled in the greenies, was the offending sentence. Next to it...was this comment: 'What if you are Chinese? Latino? Beware of generalizations.'"

I confess I don't see the problem. Ascribing certain traits to native New Yorkers seems fine to me, and doing so doesn't discount the possibility that others may share those traits. And isn't it understood that native New Yorkers can come from all cultural backgrounds? Sounds like someone is hyper-sensitive about inclusiveness.

But the topic of examination today actually comes in Reichl's next paragraph:

"Mortified, I went slinking through the newsroom, wishing I had never written those words. Why hadn't I simply said what I meant? Which was: 'Growing up in New York City, steak was an important part of my childhood.' It was the truth and no one could possibly have objected."

I object! Not to the validity of her steak-eating claims, but to the structure of that sentence. Here we encounter the dreaded dangling participle, which has made a fool out of many a well-meaning writer. The participial clause, "growing up in New York City," has become detached from its intended subject (Ruth Reichl) and has adhered itself to the steak, making it sound like it was the meat that grew up in New York.

The "native New Yorker" line may have raised the ire of the composer of the "greenies," but I submit it was the better choice, on both stylistic and grammatical grounds, than her imagined do-over.