I have spent a half hour trying to find out how I can start a list of misplaced modifiers in this blog. I couldn't find out how to do it, and so I am posting the offending headline, followed by some meanderings regarding human failings.
The headline, from CNN, reads 'Dreamliner batteries can still Fly Despite Groundings'. Well, that explains the popularity of the plane! Who wouldn't want a plane with batteries that can fly? I love this sort of headline. I found a book, sadly since lost, by the Columbia Journalism Review that is a list of such headlines. I started my own collection in residency. My first came from that august journal the New York Times. They proudly wrote 'Philippine Committee on Assassination Dissolves Itself'. Now that's a neat way to assassinate anyone, let alone your own committee. Just in passing I note that headline has more double vowels and consonants in one place than I think anything I have ever seen.
Another one I love concerns the understanding of verbs. There is a clear difference in the level of intention found in the following verbs, with intentionality increasing through the list- fall, drop, jump, plunge, dive. There is an obvious difference in understanding if you say I fell into the pool or I plunged into the pool. And yet, 'E. Side AC unit Plunges from Window, Hurts Woman'. I did not know AC units had that level of malice aforethought, but whatever....
Now, how does all this relate to people? First, people, presumably educated well intentioned people, write these headlines. Clearly then people fail. We can nto make systems idiot proof, because as is noted by Murphy the quality and ingenuity of idiots continually is rising. Humans make mistakes. In our world of technological marvels we are unwilling to accept human error as a cause of tragedy any more. Yet oddly the likelihood of human error as cause goes up when other systems work better. A great system in no way implies a great user. Just look at all the fat, wealthy old guys with Porsches. Just having a Porsche does not make you a race car driver.
We seem to be unwilling to accept the role of human error in history either. Some of humanity's greatest shames and failures have been committed not by an educated few or against the will of the People, but rather with full approval and consent. The many pogroms against Jews have been accompanied by cheering mobs, not people wailing for the tormentors and murderers to stop. We have in our own country actually passed an amendment to ban alcohol, pursued fake communists and made anal sex a crime. All with cheering approval from a majority, often a high majority.
Folly of this sort can not be seen by most people while in the midst of it. It is like trying to understand the importance of a football game in global terms when in the stadium. Outside NFL cities no one will care about what is going on, while in the stadium everyone cares very much. Almost by definition those in the stadium can not consider the overall meaning of the game because of their investment, monetary and emotional, in one of the teams.
Right now we are engaged in folly as well. We continue to gleefully pile up debt at a rate and of a total unimaginable by even the standards of the reviled Bush II period. As one writer said, we want a welfare state but not to pay for it. And we, by our electoral choices, have endorsed this idea. We have also denounced, to our credit, the more socially restrictive policy program of the losers. However, we remain engaged in a delusion that we can spend as we are doing. And let us not get into all the slogans and justifications. All the stuff about necessary spending for stimulus, war debt, social programs needing higher taxes, hurting our poorest and neediest citizens, etc, etc, etc. ALL that is waffle obscuring a central reality. We are spending more than we are bringing in.
Educated, well intentioned editors create misplaced modifiers. They don't mean to. They want the best for their publications. But they fail. Humans fail not simply individually but collectively. Our collective failures are just harder to see, as they are endorsed by most who are looking. We are engaged in a great big collective mistake about debt and spending. When we finally have to pay we are going to scream and wonder why all this is happening to us.
Of course the answer, just like everything else, is that we did it to ourselves.
It's a long way from misplaced modifiers to collective misunderstanding, but what is true in the individual is true for the collective, a sort of social science fractal geometry.
Ted
The headline, from CNN, reads 'Dreamliner batteries can still Fly Despite Groundings'. Well, that explains the popularity of the plane! Who wouldn't want a plane with batteries that can fly? I love this sort of headline. I found a book, sadly since lost, by the Columbia Journalism Review that is a list of such headlines. I started my own collection in residency. My first came from that august journal the New York Times. They proudly wrote 'Philippine Committee on Assassination Dissolves Itself'. Now that's a neat way to assassinate anyone, let alone your own committee. Just in passing I note that headline has more double vowels and consonants in one place than I think anything I have ever seen.
Another one I love concerns the understanding of verbs. There is a clear difference in the level of intention found in the following verbs, with intentionality increasing through the list- fall, drop, jump, plunge, dive. There is an obvious difference in understanding if you say I fell into the pool or I plunged into the pool. And yet, 'E. Side AC unit Plunges from Window, Hurts Woman'. I did not know AC units had that level of malice aforethought, but whatever....
Now, how does all this relate to people? First, people, presumably educated well intentioned people, write these headlines. Clearly then people fail. We can nto make systems idiot proof, because as is noted by Murphy the quality and ingenuity of idiots continually is rising. Humans make mistakes. In our world of technological marvels we are unwilling to accept human error as a cause of tragedy any more. Yet oddly the likelihood of human error as cause goes up when other systems work better. A great system in no way implies a great user. Just look at all the fat, wealthy old guys with Porsches. Just having a Porsche does not make you a race car driver.
We seem to be unwilling to accept the role of human error in history either. Some of humanity's greatest shames and failures have been committed not by an educated few or against the will of the People, but rather with full approval and consent. The many pogroms against Jews have been accompanied by cheering mobs, not people wailing for the tormentors and murderers to stop. We have in our own country actually passed an amendment to ban alcohol, pursued fake communists and made anal sex a crime. All with cheering approval from a majority, often a high majority.
Folly of this sort can not be seen by most people while in the midst of it. It is like trying to understand the importance of a football game in global terms when in the stadium. Outside NFL cities no one will care about what is going on, while in the stadium everyone cares very much. Almost by definition those in the stadium can not consider the overall meaning of the game because of their investment, monetary and emotional, in one of the teams.
Right now we are engaged in folly as well. We continue to gleefully pile up debt at a rate and of a total unimaginable by even the standards of the reviled Bush II period. As one writer said, we want a welfare state but not to pay for it. And we, by our electoral choices, have endorsed this idea. We have also denounced, to our credit, the more socially restrictive policy program of the losers. However, we remain engaged in a delusion that we can spend as we are doing. And let us not get into all the slogans and justifications. All the stuff about necessary spending for stimulus, war debt, social programs needing higher taxes, hurting our poorest and neediest citizens, etc, etc, etc. ALL that is waffle obscuring a central reality. We are spending more than we are bringing in.
Educated, well intentioned editors create misplaced modifiers. They don't mean to. They want the best for their publications. But they fail. Humans fail not simply individually but collectively. Our collective failures are just harder to see, as they are endorsed by most who are looking. We are engaged in a great big collective mistake about debt and spending. When we finally have to pay we are going to scream and wonder why all this is happening to us.
Of course the answer, just like everything else, is that we did it to ourselves.
It's a long way from misplaced modifiers to collective misunderstanding, but what is true in the individual is true for the collective, a sort of social science fractal geometry.
Ted
Encountering misplaced modifiers are one my life's little pleasures. I majored in Linguistics. Thirty plus years later it is still my heart's desire. I especially enjoyed your commentary on verbs. My wonderful husband Dennis has no taste for the depth of our language, "What does lugubrious mean and why don't you just say sad?"
ReplyDeleteLugubrious is a dear friend to me. After my MTBI, I lost so much expressive language I spent six months in speech therapy. I couldn't think of the word glass. I knew it wasn't a cup, but cup was the word that came out. I still confuse mowing the lawn with vacuuming when I am tired. When the speech therapist tested me, she was shocked when I came out with lugubrious in the multiple choice after looking at sketches of a man. She'd never had a patient get that question correctly and asked how I did with so much language loss. It was one of my mother's favorite words. You know teens well, as a father . . . when Mom asked us to do something we didn't want to do, she frequently told us, "Stop looking so lugubrious."
I had a number of other thoughts when I read the paragraph on "educated, well intentioned editors." I've never forgotten my college newspaper that ran a front page article about a field hockey game with another college, entitled, "Stick Women Master Bates." Not a misplaced modifier; yet it has stuck with me because no one that I knew talked about the headline! When I brought it up people didn't even raise an eyebrow or muffle a giggle. [Please don't tell me that you don't get it, Ted!
This triggered another thought. Editors are modifiers. Newspaper editors around here often misplace sections of articles, parts of sentences, and pertinent information. This leads to collective misunderstanding.