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a dangling participle

The sentence below is from IT by Stephen King.

Here, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.

It seems to have a grammatical error known as a dangling modifier. Since the doer(s) of ‘ganged around’ should be ‘waitresses, nurses, city employees.’ they are supposed to be the subject of the passage, but they aren’t but he is.

Am I right?

One more thing, as this sentence is not so great in grammatical sense, I did revise it as follows. (Just take out the part of ‘ganged around’ and put it behind its subject in meaning, that is waitresses, nurses, city employees.)

Here, he sees waitresses, nurses, city employees, ganged around a bus stop with a sign reading KENMORE SQUARE CITY CENTER, their faces naked and puffed with sleep.

Last but not least, how can someone's face can be naked? Surely their face can be puffed with sleep but how can it be naked?

morti
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    All faces are naked until you put something on them (cosmetics, glasses, etc.) – KillingTime Jun 02 '19 at 10:51
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    I believe this is a perfectly ordinary bit a grammar called a fronted adverbial clause, but I'll wait for confirmation from others on that. (Or a pair of them perhaps, or maybe even three.) – Phil Sweet Jun 02 '19 at 14:06
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    I think you are right: the subject is "waitresses, nurses, city employees". – BillJ Jun 02 '19 at 15:41
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    Possible duplicate of "Dangling Participles" (Pullum challenges the 'We hate the misplaced participle' brigade with an article titled 'Does it really matter?') (This of course where the clarity of the sentence is not compromised.) Here, it's fine, and a sensible way to avoid stacking two weighty descriptors. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 02 '19 at 16:35

1 Answers1

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It's not strictly a dangling particle because a dangling participle has no subject.

For instance in the following sentence "looking out the window" is a dangling participle.

Looking out the window, the mountains were beautiful.

There is no sign of a personal subject in sight. If you really wanted you could understand it as the mountains looking out the window and this act making them beautiful, but the common sense understanding is that it is the writer or other subject who does the looking.

By contrast the modifier in your sentence does have a subject as you showed -- it's the nurses and the city employees. To make a clearer sentence all you needed do was shift the modifier. Perhaps it could be argued (though I'm not sure I agree) that the modifier is misplaced, i.e. a misplaced modifier.

A misplaced modifier is a word, phrase, or clause that is improperly separated from the word it modifies / describes.

S Conroy
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