A Word, Please: Misplaced prepositions can be a comedy of errors

According to language legend, a classified ad once made this intriguing offer: Antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers.

And if you believe that one, I have another: Mixing bowl set designed to please cook with round bottom for efficient beating.

Welcome to the wacky world of prepositional phrases, where, if you’re not careful, you can stray so far from your meaning that people are still laughing about your communication skills a century later.

A prepositional phrase is made up of a preposition and its object: with cheese, on it, at the restaurant, of La Mancha. In each, you have a preposition like “with,” “on,” “at” or “of,” paired with a noun phrase (a noun or pronoun, with or without its own article or adjective) like “cheese,” “it,” “the restaurant” or “La Mancha.”

Prepositional phrases are modifiers. They add additional information to nouns like “burger” in “burger with cheese” and to verbs like “meet” in “we’ll meet at the restaurant.” That makes prepositional phrases similar to adjectives and adverbs: They modify other words.

But people don’t usually think of prepositional phrases as being like adjectives and adverbs, and that’s how the trouble begins. You’d never place an adjective so far from its noun that its meaning is no longer clear, say by changing “beautiful desk with thick legs” to “desk with thick legs beautiful.” Instead, native speakers are very good at putting adjectives, and often adverbs, right where they do their jobs best.

Prepositional phrases we don’t handle as well.

Compare: “I skillfully photographed an elephant” with “I photographed an enormous elephant” with “I photographed an elephant in my pajamas.” These sentences have the same basic structure: I photographed an elephant. Each has a modifier, “skillfully” in the first one, “enormous” in the second and “in my pajamas” in the third.

With the plain old adverb or adjective, it’s hard to go wrong. But when your modifier is a prepositional phrase like “in my pajamas,” it’s all too easy to make a ridiculous statement about a creature that, hopefully, couldn’t fit into your pajamas even if it wanted to.

The key to handling prepositional phrases well is understanding reader expectations. Readers usually presume that a modifier applies to the noun or verb closest to it. If you write, “Robert quickly ran down the street and bought beautiful flowers, bread and batteries,” readers figure that the running was more likely to be quick than the buying. They know that the flowers, not the batteries, were beautiful.

This isn’t an exact science. You could have “beautiful” extend to three nouns, “he bought beautiful flowers, jewelry and trinkets.” So the reader has his job cut out for him. As the writer, it’s your job to make his as easy as possible. You do that by placing modifying phrases where their meaning is clearest. When that’s not possible in the sentence, you may need to do a total overhaul.

For example, “Antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers” is easily fixed by moving the prepositional phrase closer to the noun it modifies: Antique desk with thick legs and large drawers, suitable for lady.

But note how “suitable” threatens to complicate matters. This is not a prepositional phrase. It’s an adjective phrase. But it works the same way. When we position it so that the nearest noun is “drawers,” we introduce the possibility that it’s the drawers, not the desk, that are suitable.

Our comma helps, this time, but sometimes when a sentence has multiple modifying phrases, there’s no way to get them all close enough to the noun or verb they modify. That’s when a total overhaul is required.

“I was still in my pajamas when I photographed the elephant.” “These mixing bowls are sure to please any cook. They have round bottoms for efficient beating.”

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].