Nice Try, Though
Spotted: 10/13/2016
Creator: Unknown
I love the sentiment in this meme, but there are a couple of things wrong here.
The obvious ones are punctuation. We have an aborted ellipses (two dots) at the end of the first sentence. That’s a simple fix—just drop one of the periods. In the second sentence, we have the word though functioning as a mild interjection. (If it were in the middle of the sentence, it would be a parenthetical.) It needs to be separated from Nice try by a comma.
Those are the easy ones. The tricky part is the dependent clause, In order to insult me. There is no overt subject in this clause, but the implied subject is you. It’s definitely not me, since I’m the subject of that clause. The problem comes when you read past the comma and I becomes the subject of the next part of the sentence. What we have here is a dangling modifier.
Another grammar resource, Ask Betty, provides several good examples of dangling modifiers:
While cleaning the house, my wallet turned up.
After killing two victims, the police arrested the murderer.
Hissing furiously the whole time, I was bitten by the snake.
All three of these have the same problem as the first sentence of the meme. Clearly, my wallet was not cleaning the house, the police weren’t killing victims. In each sentence, the implied subject of the introductory (dependent) clause is not the subject of the second clause. It creates a jarring shift as the reader recalibrates in an attempt to figure out who is doing what.
One way to fix this meme would be to change the second half of the sentence to make the subjects match.
In order to insult me, you must first have an opinion I value.
While cleaning the house, I found my wallet.
After killing two victims, the murderer was arrested by the police.
Hissing furiously the whole time, the snake bit me.
Another way is to explicitly state the subject of the first clause. That was the easier way to fix the meme, so that’s what I did:
