I am unsure whether Browning was patting or hitting grammarians when he wrote A grammarian’s funeral. Apparently, they had incurred divine displeasure.
Hearing someone prowling outside, St. Peter asked “Who is it?” and got the reply, “ It is I.” The apostle shot back, “Go to hell, we have enough English teachers here.”
Shaky grammar invites ludicrous and even disastrous outcomes. Asked by the teacher for an example of “error of proximity”, (“error of attraction”, according to Fowler) one boy obliged: “The boss keeping his private secretary on his lap.”
Readying for his sermon, a priest noticed a piece of paper on his rostrum—a request from the wife of a newly-recruited sailor to be read aloud. He reeled off: “Tom having gone to sea his wife desires the prayers of the congregation for his safety.” His only fault was adding/omitting pauses in the wrong place. The flock heard: “Tom, having gone to see his wife, desires the prayers of the congregation for his safety”.
(May not be totally irrelevant: Lynne Truss, in “Eats, shoots and leaves”, shows the importance of punctuation: “A woman, without her man, is nothing” and “A woman: without her, man is nothing.”)
Pronouns can kill.
A father, helped by his son while putting a post in a hole, instructed him, “When I nod my head, you hit it with the hammer.”
The child faithfully obeyed; the man took one month to recover. In newspaper corrections, insult to a war veteran was undone thus: “Please read “bottle scarred” as “battle scared”. Would the crooner who, on recovery from a car accident, saw this in the day’s newspaper, “It is feared his vocal cords were not injured”, have felt flattered? While on this, how about the telegram to a survivor: “Sorry to hear you escaped unhurt in the air crash”?
The husband who “... recovered from a skull injury and shock caused by coming into contact with a live wife” would have noticed little difference between a live wire and a live wife! And who were the dignitaries present at the “Wild Wife League” meet—nature lovers or angry wives?
Decades ago, a mathematics professor edited the English section of our magazine. In an article I submitted, I had mentioned a place “uninhabited by man”.
No wonder, a wizard with numbers and a stickler for accuracy, he corrected it as “uninhabited by men”, forgetting the difference between the two!
Now to end this—of course, not with a preposition. Churchill said that objection to ending a sentence with a preposition was something up with which he would not put!