Woe Is the Dangling Phrase [People]

The professor is not without apprehension as she submits to you a lesson from her somewhat strange and estranged sister who is a pseudoexpatriate living it up in Paris. Her name is Dr. Grammatica (the ninny changed her name because of an argument with your esteemed professor over commas); she rides a motorcycle with a sidecar, owns a parrot named Mrs. Wiggins (the parrot often rides in the sidecar), prefers to watch rugby rather than American football, never smokes because it upsets the parrot, and makes many trips each year to London to visit her favorite pub, The Coughing Pig. She has a Ph.D. degree in linguistics from Oxford, but for some reason prefers not to speak of it. To some extent, she shuns what she considers the haughtiness of the English (she´s been tainted by the French point of view), and she is especially contemptuous of her highly regarded sister, your own Prof. Grammar.