Mea Culpa: don’t let your participles dangle

Questions of style and usage in this week’s Independent

The Hohensalzburg Fortress in Salzburg was certainly not defended by clergy (Getty)

I wouldn’t know a participle from a hole in the ground, but I know what a dangling participle is; or, at least, I recognise one when I see one, having had them pointed out to me so often. It’s when you start a sentence referring to a person or thing, but before you get to that person or thing you mention someone or something else and the reader loses the thread.

It is a particular danger in obituaries, where the temptation is to pack a lot of biographical information into long sentences. We had a right bobby dangler in an early version of our account of the life of John Pedler: “Too young to fight in the Second World War, his mother Anne Isabel Stafford, an academic and author of Silver Street and The Great Mrs Pennington, sent him to America.”

Thank you to Beryl Wall for prompting us to sort it out. All we had to do was insert “He was” at the start and “so” before “his mother”.

Desire line: A comment article about the decision by Dyson, the vacuum cleaner company, to move its HQ to Singapore concluded thus: “We need to examine why, exactly, Dyson is moving – and ensure Britain becomes equally desirous.”

Thanks to Gavin Turner for prompting us to change it. We meant “desirable”. The convention is that “desirous” means “having desire”, as in “Dyson was desirous of the low-tax joys of Singapore” (although the company insists that neither tax nor Brexit was the reason for the move); whereas “desirable” means “to be desired”.

The hills are alive: In a travel article about Salzburg in Austria, we mentioned the museum in the Hohensalzburg Fortress, “which takes a closer look at the design of the fortress and the canons used to defend it”. The idea of clergy defending the castle sounds like a long lost deleted scene from The Sound of Music.

We meant cannon, as Philip Nalpanis pointed out. The difference in spelling is etymological: canon comes from Greek kanon, rule (a cathedral cleric is someone subject to an ecclesiastical rule), whereas the big gun comes from the Italian cannone, large tube, from canna, cane, reed.

Even more arbitrarily, the usual plural of the artillery is cannon with no “s”. I don’t know why.

Mixed metaphor of the week: “Minister takes veiled swipe at Trump’s trade policy in major speech.” This headline conjured up the alarming vision of Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, draped in diaphanous fabric and trying to punch a lever-arch file on a pedestal.