[greymule]

OK. I think we understand each other. In my opinion, the insertion of unnecessary and technically incorrect language was confusing. Perhaps this affects me more than most people since my job is to see that writing is unambiguous.

Now:

"throw the cow over the fence some hay"

Or "She answered an ad for someone who could dance on the campus bulletin board."

It is true that no one will suffer permanant misunderstanding about the cow and the hay. People find the faulty syntax (not the grammar) humorous because, for a brief moment, it appears that someone is saying, "Throw the cow over the fence." When the listener hears "some hay." The meaning is clear.

Technically, "cow" at first appears to be the direct object of "throw" until "some hay" appears as the true direct object and renders "cow" the indirect object (throw to the cow . . .).

But there's still a minor ambiguity. The phrase "over the fence" probably modifies "throw," but it could modify "cow," as in, Q: Which cow? A: The cow over the fence, not the cow in the gully or the cow with the brown spots. Perhaps not likely, but plausible.

I have seen business and professional documents that have caused serious problems because an alternative meaning created by the same type of faulty syntax was plausible enough for readers to accept it as the true meaning.

As with rule books, the people doing the writing know what they mean, so they don't necessarily see the ways that people can misinterpret it.

But even Shakespeare wrote ambiguous lines, lines of which scholars still debate the meaning, and sometimes because of syntactical glitches similar to the one with the cow and the hay.