There have been some disturbing things in the news lately.
When reading a story about the three Americans and the Briton who subdued the gunman on a French train, Karen was dismayed to come upon this sentence: "The assault was described as a terrorist attack by the Belgian prime minister."
Her question: "Will the PM go to jail?"
Bob was incredulous when he read about a mystery chuck of ice that crashed into a California home: "A loud crash startled a California family at home Wednesday morning when a chunk of ice the size of a basketball hurdled from the sky and smashed through the roof, likely the result of frozen moisture breaking loose from an airplane flying high overhead."
"Can you imagine?" Bob wrote. "Not sure what the ice chunk jumped over; instead, maybe it hurtled from the sky."
"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice. Actually, that one makes sense. Alice has just said goodbye to her feet after eating a cake that has made her telescope to 9 feet tall in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," but in this case the 19th-century author Lewis Carroll offered an apology and an explanation by way of an aside: "She was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English."
Forgetting how to speak good English — it seems to be going around these days.
In Karen's example above, the unintended meaning comes from a misplaced modifying phrase: "The assault was described as a terrorist attack by the Belgian prime minister." Moving the prepositional phrase to its proper location, adjacent to the verb it modifies, eliminates the ambiguity: "The assault was described by the Belgian prime minister as a terrorist attack."