Spotted just now in an online customer review for a handheld vacuum:
We have a 2 year old daughter who loves to throw food and her five cousins who ride in the car.
… those poor cousins, being thrown around the inside of a car by a freakishly strong two-year-old!
I hope the grownups at least keep the windows rolled up, so the other kids don’t get chucked right out onto the highway when the throwing-around starts up.
3 responses so far ↓
1 FScott // Jul 14, 2007 at 9:47 am
Perhaps not a misplaced modifier but the use of a conjunction instead of a preposition. Upon, toward, around, at, and through would all work well.
2 Ocelopotamus // Jul 14, 2007 at 11:59 am
Yes, that’s possible as well, if what she meant to say is that the food was thrown at or on the cousins.
But the last part of the sentence feels tacked on — I think the writer was just too lazy to start a new sentence, and what she really wanted to say was:
“We have a two-year-old daughter who loves to throw food. Her five cousins ride in the car, too, and sometimes they create messes as well.”
Or, alternatively:
“We have a two-year-old daughter and her five cousins who ride in the car. And our daughter is a food-throwing little beast.”
In any case, the sentence — like the car — is a little bit overloaded.
3 Aaron // Jul 15, 2007 at 10:02 pm
She has brute strength…like a spider, which can lift several times its own body weight…
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