Hack Job

Today we have a fairly dreadful (for two reasons) sentence from Salon.com's Broadsheet column. Let's see if we can't fix it.

Los Angeles Times: The strange, unsettling relationship between convicted serial killer Wayne Adam Ford (who cut off at least one of his victim's breasts and stored it in a Ziploc bag) and British-born actress Victoria Redstall (who formerly worked as a spokesmodel for breast-enhancement supplements).

First, since we're going to be looking at that horrible image ("who cut off at least one of his victim's breasts and stored it in a Ziploc bag") for a bit and I don't really want to, let's silly it up: "known cat-toy-taker Wayne Adam Ford (who took at least one of his cat's toys and stored it in a Ziploc bag)".

Now. What's wrong with it? Two things. First, the apostrophe is in the wrong place, confusing singular and plural. If you read the article, you discover that the cat-owner has four cats, and that he took, as far as we know, one toy from one of the cats (each of whom has two) and put it in a plastic bag: no mention of any more toys than that. But the way to punctuate that fact is "who took at least one of his cats' toys...", since "cat's toys" means there's only one cat.

The second problem, the biggie, is the misplaced modifier "at least one". There's no way to tell if it refers to the cats or the toys. (Often, usage manuals will warn against the misplaced modifier, even though any sensible person can figure out what's really meant, as in Groucho Marx' "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know." In this case, however, it is truly impossible to tell which noun the modifier is modifying.)

Since "at least one" can refer either to the cats or the toys, we need to rewrite the clause so that we can tell exactly what it's referring to. If one of the cats had at least one toy taken, we need to say that: "who took toys from at least one of his cats." If more than one cat each had at least one toy taken, we need to say that: "who took at least one toy from his cats" or "who took at least one toy from each of his cats", as the case may be. The best solution, though, would be to drop that "at least" entirely and switch the whole thing to "who was found to have the toy of one of his cats in a Ziploc bag." (Yeah, I know: passive voice. Sometimes it can be your friend, though. There are other ways to write that sentence: I'm just suggesting an example.)

As I've said so many times before and will presumably have to say again, this is why you can't replace editors with a spellchecker and a faint hope.