July 18, 2005

Dangling modifier arrested in Beeston

From the Guardian, "Three cities, four killers", 7/17/2005

Yet last summer Khan changed. It was following his final trip to Pakistan. Those who knew him had detected a mood change. Two months after he visited the Commons last October, Khan resigned as a popular teaching assistant at the Hillside Primary School in Leeds. In the same period, Tanweer too was undergoing a profound personal transformation. Last December, he met militant groups linked to al-Qaeda north of Lahore. Days after returning to Beeston, a man he met was arrested for an attack in 2002 on an Islamabad church near a US embassy. [emphasis added]

I had to read this twice, because at first I thought I was learning that one of the Islamabad church bombers had been arrested in Yorkshire. That's why, as Geoff Pullum has pointed out, dangling modifiers are bad manners.

Posted by Mark Liberman at July 18, 2005 05:45 AM