We often don’t notice dangling or misplaced modifiers in speech, but they can unintentionally create some really funny images. University of Michigan English Professor Anne Curzan was thinking about the grammar lessons she learned as a kid, and misplaced and dangling modifiers stuck in her head. “In the grammar book that I had – this must have been junior high, late elementary school – there was this sentence: ‘Clinging to the side of the aquarium, Mary saw a starfish.’”