Seen on a YouTube thumbnail:
She wants to become a YouTuber, which as a comedian makes me furious.
Did you catch the problem(s)?
How would you rewrite the above to avoid the grammatical fuckup(s)?
Thursday, April 16, 2026
6 comments:
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How about this: She wants to become a YouTuber, which, as a comedian, makes me furious.
ReplyDeleteThe problem we've got here is a dangling modifier. After a modifier, the subject of the clause has to relate to the modifier, otherwise the modifier has nothing to modify, i.e., it's left dangling.
DeleteExamples:
• As a child, French was difficult. (French was a child?)
• Sitting on the branch, the urge to poop on the child overcame the crow. (The urge was sitting on the branch?)
So if we go back to this—
...as a comedian, makes me furious
—is the comedian making the comedian furious?
Possible rewrite:
She wants to become a YouTuber which, as a comedian, I find infuriating.
Normally, you put a comma before "which" (like in the original sentence), but you also don't want to over-comma the sentence, so I switched the comma's position, giving it a parenthetical function along with a second comma.
Ah, okay.
DeleteThe correct rewriting would obviously be: She wants to become a YouTuber; as an unemployed liberal arts major, I find this infuriating.
ReplyDelete(Oh, and I deliberately did not hyphenate "liberal arts." I think people are familiar enough with "liberal arts" as a field that they are not going to mistake this for "liberal [arts major]." I feel the same way about "high school student." You don't want to over-comma; I don't want to over-hyphenate.)
ReplyDeleteYeah, on Substack, I talked very early on about how hyphenation is arguably unnecessary if the phrasal adjective is very familiar. Quite often, it's a judgment call, which is one reason why I'm not overly fond of this "rule," but when you think about it, more or even most of the choices we make when expressing ourselves come down to judgment calls. I stick by the idea that language is very rule-governed, but rules are only part of what governs language, and rules themselves change over time.
DeletePractically speaking, I don't want to over-hyphenate either.