Grammar and Motorcycles

I happen to own a motorcycle, and I like motorcycling, so I guess that’s as good a reason as any to feature a motorcycle comic on Valentine’s Day. It was sent by my biker friend Jonathan Burt. I’m not sure where he got it.

The comic touches on a thought I’ve been meaning to post about for some time, but I’ve been waiting for a good example to make my point. This is it.

You can easily have more than one modifier in a sentence, and have them all refer to the same thing.

It can be tricky to decide what order to put those modifiers in. In fact the sentence above is an improvement over the first version of it that I wrote, which was

You can easily have more than one modifier in a sentence that refer to the same thing.

Does “that refer to the same thing” modify “sentence,” or does it modify “modifier”? It’s sitting right next to the word “sentence,” and the rule in English is that modifiers go as close to what they refer to as possible. But “sentence” is singular, and “refer” is plural. That can’t be right. I could have swapped the two modifying phrases and written:

You can easily have more than one modifier that refer to the same thing in a sentence.

But that still has the problem of “refer” being a plural verb sitting right next to a singular noun, “modifier.” It doesn’t sound right even though it is. (“More than one” is a plural.) So it’s a bad sentence either way. I solved the problem by making a compound sentence and doing some rewording.

Okay, that was a complicated example. Let’s go to the comic.

I saw a man riding a motorcycle with a broken leg.
I saw a man with a broken leg riding a motorcycle.

The rule about putting the modifier close to what it modifies works well with this sentence.

SO—when you have more than one modifier in your sentence, and they refer to the same thing, THINK!