The previous post described how a correction, even a quasi-erroneous one, can leave a lasting imprint on writing style. But a split infinitive is a mirthless solecism compared to the mockery—a cruelly effective pedagogical tool—the dangling modifier is supposed to engender. Again, given my education, which eschewed the stuffy business of teaching of “correct” usage, I became aware of the jeopardy posed by stranded participles only after an offender was brought to task. In this case, the offender was fictional.

In John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick, a member of his suburban coven, Sukie Rougemont, has produced a gossip piece for the local rag. The reaction from her friends is less than rapturous:

“Well, honey, it had color, but you do run on a bit and honestly—now don’t be offended—you must watch your participles. They dangle all over the place.”

Indeed, Sukie’s infelicitous prose (did Updike wince slightly while sabotaging his usual flawless style?) does showcase a classic example of a dangling participle inadvertently conveying a ridiculous image:

Constructed circa 1895 in a brick English style, with a symmetrical façade and massive chimneys at either end, the new proprietor hopes to convert his acquisition to multiple usages…

Of course, the new proprietor was not constructed in a brick English style. A sentence such this falls in line with the comical botches usage guides have typically trotted out to buttress their arguments. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary of Usage goes as far to speculate that “funny examples have apparently been invented for the purpose of illustration. Actual dangling modifiers are more often of such a nature as to excite little mirth; indeed, they may hardly be noticeable except to practising rhetorician or usage expert.”

Case in point is a line from a recent Economist article on Ireland’s upcoming poll on the Lisbon referendum: “What of the second referendum on Lisbon this autumn? Looking at the polls, a Yes vote is widely expected.”

Reading this sentence according to the “rules,” we could quibble that a Yes vote would be unlikely to look at a poll. But that underrated tool for interpreting text—a degree of sanity—allows us to overlook the supposedly inappropriate modifier. If the result does not, for example, imply that a man was built from brick in the late 19th-century, it seems that a dangler can be easily swallowed, even by readers who can recognize one. Despite this commonsense approach, some of us still chaperone our participles with paranoid vigilance: we either struggle to parachute in phantom subjects (“Looking at the polls, most observers expect a Yes vote”) or groan in shame when discovering outbreaks in our own writing.

I guess a common formative experience for anyone whose formal education extends into their third decade is the return of the first college paper. In my case, after successfully throwing myself through the hoops represented by the Leaving Certificate exam in English (so clearly defined for my cohort that those metaphorical rings might as well have been on fire), I had turned in a paper of a standard similar, I thought, to that churned out in a febrile haze the preceding summer.

Nonchalantly expecting the pat on the head previous efforts had garnered, I was aghast at the blizzard of red ink annotating my text, which was instantly transformed in my eyes into a barbaric scrawl that must have elicited pained groans from its underpaid marker. Among the critical remarks that seemed to eclipse in word count the contents they were supposed to explicate was a cryptic abbreviation attached to an arrow spearing a hapless phrase: “sp. inf.!”

It says something about the calibre of my school education that it took a while (this was pre-Google) for me to learn that this was short for “split infinitive.” It then took even longer for me to find out what a split infinitive is.

I subsequently discovered that in my ignorance I was more in tune with modern usage than the schoolmarmish academic who had inadvertently demonstrated the gap in expectations between school and academic work.

In essence, contemporary pundits argue that to avoid a split infinitive is to crimp your style in obedience to a rule that cannot be broken in the language you are supposed to be emulating. In Latin, as in Romance languages, the infinitive form of a verb is a single word: for example, ire, “to go” (French: aller). In English, as just shown, the form comprises two words because the verb is prefaced by the particle “to.” Apparently, in the 19th century some usage panjandrums argued that muscling in a third word between the two—an “adverbial modifier” as Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage describes it—threatened to break the holy bond between “to” and its verb.

The aforementioned Merriam-Webster volume gives its view:

To repeat, the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis. The original cause for complaint was probably awareness of a relatively sudden marked increase in use of the construction, perhaps combined with the knowledge that in those more elegant languages, Latin and Greek, the infinitive is never split—because it is a single word distinguished by its ending rather than by an introductory particle.

But if your initial awareness of a term coincides with your being taken to task for its misuse (even if the correction itself is semi-erroneous), can you ever return to that prelapsarian state of blithely dropping in adverbial modifiers?  Even now, there is a reflexive wariness that steers me “to write cautiously” rather than “to cautiously write.”

But if a correction from long ago can continue to influence your writing style, what effect can mockery have? I’ll take that up in the next post when I address a usage issue where the battle between fundamentalists and modernisers is still being waged.

Sometimes the scattered data accumulated through adventitious cultural activity appear to align in such a way as to make you briefly give credence to Jung’s dubious concept of synchronicity. For example, about a week ago, I watched Uli Edel’s The Baader-Meinhof Complex. It’s an entertaining enough film, although any ambition to explore either the philosophy of the post-war radical left in Germany or the latent tensions muffled by the Federal Republic’s affluent democracy is jettisoned in favour of a scrupulously staged costume drama, featuring chic killers and enough shooting to please a Bruce Willis fan.

Trying to fill in the gaps left by the film, Moira checked Wikipedia. As well as getting some background about the group—more “correctly” known as the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion)—she also discovered the term “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon,” which was new to both of us. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon occurs when a person, after having learned some (usually obscure) fact, word, phrase, or other item for the first time, encounters that item again, perhaps several times, shortly after having learned it. This is a specialised version of the effect of serendipity.

The “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” was coined by a reader of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Terry Mullen. The Minnesota newspaper runs a daily column called “Bulletin Board,” for which readers, using pseudonyms (in this case it was ‘Gigetto on Lincoln’), submit humorous or interesting anecdotes. The term was coined when Mullen submitted a story around 1986, about how he first heard about the terrorist group known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and then heard about it again a short while later from a different source.

Readers suddenly piled on with their own versions of the phenomenon, which quickly came to be known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Today, all similar stories are published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press Bulletin Board under the heading “Baader Meinhof Phenomenon.”

The day after reading the above explanation, I came across the following passage on page 59 in the Harper Perennial paperback of Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances:

I know the ordinary often masquerades as the extraordinary, that if you put thirty people in a room, the likelihood that two have the same birthday is over ninety percent, that when you learn a new word and it then seems suddenly ever present it is only because you have just begun to notice what was there all along. (This once happened to me with the word cathect. Also Rosicrucian.) Maybe that’s all that this find of mine was. For all I know, maybe Tzvi Gal-Chen and Buenos Aires were both already pervasive terms and I’d simply stumbled across two examples of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

So, in the immediate wake of learning that “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” describes the déjà vu-like feeling that arises when re-encountering an unusual word or term soon after running into it for the first time*, I recursively experienced that phenomenon by again coming across the phrase “Baader-Meinhof phenomenon” in an unrelated source. Was this mildly jarring serendipity evidence of Jung’s collective unconscious, which implies an invisible grid of meaningful connections between apparently isolated events? Or simply dumb coincidence?

(I’d guess Ulrike and Andreas, as good dialectic materialists, would truculently nod their heads for the latter option.)

*I wonder if there is a phrase that describes a variant of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon as it applies to people. Viz. when you have just been thinking about somebody you haven’t seen in ages and the person in question turns up, as if summoned by your recollections.

In general, I’m a fan of the Financial Times. The breadth of its international coverage rivals that offered by the New York Times and its journalists’ grounding in the intricacies of high finance and macroeconomics (e.g. what’s quantitative easing?) have made it a go-to resource during the prolonged crisis. On the downside, the FT’s authority in matters financial means that its “demographic” is skewered towards those masters of the universe whose blunders have been diligently chronicled by the paper. And as the Financial Times–unlike its proletarian red-top brethren–is more reliant on advertising than copy sales for revenue, some of the fluffier adjuncts to the main paper seem designed solely to tickle the bellies of a fat cat readership.

Exhibit A, with a title running radically against the grain of the times, is the supplement “How to spend it.” An aria to conspicuous consumption, this magazine is primarily a vehicle that delivers advertising for Italian haute-couture, yachts, French luggage, business-class travel, and watches costing several months’ after-tax income (that is for plebs who earn less than several hundred grand per year).

Almost indistinguishable from the glossy ads are the glossy articles. In the issue dated Friday April 24, hot subjects addressed included hedge-fund managers learning how to fly jet fighters (an old standby for this kind of supplement), the state of the Bordeaux en primeur market, and the latest trends in underground garages (apparently all the rage among the plutocracy). From the last-named piece, the following insight into how the rich like to spend their time and money is reported with a straight face:

Other car fanatics’ requests verge on the eccentric. Bailey [a buying agent] was involved with one west London project where the client had a glass-box car lift that lowered into a basement where the owner had a Jacuzzi. “He likes to relax by lying back in his Jacuzzi and admiring his Ferrari,” says Baily.

When the British chancellor recently raised the top rate of tax to 50p in the pound, the FT dutifully reported the outrage among its affected demographic. Some objected that the government would simply waste the money. Very possibly it, like most governments, will. But after reading the in-house gazette of their shopping habits, you have to wonder what the hyper-rich see as “squandering.”