Whenever I see "dangling" written, I think of the gardeners' conversation in Shakespeare's "Richard II" when one tells the other, "go thou bind up yon dangling apricots".
Apricots can be difficult to grow. They bloom early and in a good season, produce an overabundance of heavy fruits, the weight of which, if not pruned or given artificial support, may break the boughs.
That's enough about drupes.... even droopy drupes.
I have two tips to share:
1. Punctuation is a courtesy to the reader
2. It is better to be clear that to be strictly correct (grammatically speaking), especially when strict correctness is so ostentatious that the meaning of the sentence is upstaged by the construction.
For example, last Sunday, our church's vacancy pastor preached on the preposterous pettiness of correcting a dangling preposition (during a time of World War).
Please excuse the alliteration. When I write, I have a bad tendency to amuse myself!
The pastor quoted a possibly apocryphal tale illustrating a ridiculous dangling preposition. The pastor did not give attribution, but others credit the story to Sir Ernest Gowers' in "Plain English, 1948" (my grandfather gave me a copy and I still have it)
"Put up with" vs "Up with which I will not put."
Shortly after church, as I was preparing luncheon, a "to be honest" phrase was misused (IMHO) in the voice-over of an advertisement. This did not involve a dangling preposition, but it did involve a bothersome word order.
I do not remember what medicine or nutritional supplement gave relief to the endorser. I just cannot forget his horrible use of English.
"It was a relief to be honest" is not the same as "To be honest, it was a relief...". Even if there is a comma, as in "It was a relief, to be honest" and the speaker pauses to honor the comma, the word order is still wrong.
"It was a relief to be honest" puts the emphasis on the honesty of the speaker, and suggests (at least to pedantic member of his audience) that the giver of the testimonial is an almost-incorrigible liar, who customarily lies when promoting a product, and feels guilty about it.
"To be honest", is a filler phrase. That is, a short series of unimportant words used during speech to buy thinking time for the speaker.
In the case of a spoken (and no doubt rehearsed and scripted) TV endorsement of a product, it seems ridiculous to me that the speaker would use almost as much time enunciating a filler phrase as making his point (that he experienced relief).
While researching "filler phrases", because I always check multiple sources, I came upon an English as a Foreign Language source.
It seems to me that foreign speakers often learn the fillers and overlook the admonition to use fillers sparingly.
If one is going to learn a language, one does not want to learn to emulate poor habits and overdo them.
When I was taken a course to teach EFL in Piccadilly, I found that student EFL teachers there were being instructed to teach poor elocution. Hyde Park, we were told, should be pronounced "Hyb Paak". Why? When challenged (by me, of course), my instructor explained that most Londoners slur such words, so foreign speakers should slur, too.
I did not do well on that course. I fail to see why teachers should deliberately teach wrong pronunciation.
Back to fillers. Other speech fillers are "like", "really", "if I may say so", "you know", "I guess...", "I think", "I would say", "You know," "as I always say", "anyway", "well," "I guess". "well, I guess". "I should say". "To tell you the truth".... to name a few.
Listening fillers are short words of agreement, encouragement, and prompting that are uttered to demonstrate to a speaker that the listener is actively listening, engaged, and interested in what the speaker is saying. "Really?" "You did?" "You don't say!", "You didn't?" "Wow", or various vocalizations "mmmm", "uh-hah", etc.
Finally, my ear worm for today is "Newsworth" by Greenslade.
All the best,
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