I'm a very avid reader. I know I'm not alone in this, but I seem to be a somewhat extreme case. I guess you'd say "obsessive-compulsive reader" is a more accurate description. If I forget to take a book with me into the bathroom, I have to resort to reading shampoo bottles, hand-soap dispensers, or even toothpaste tubes. Well, I want you to know I consider myself lucky that I live in Korea, where most of this emergency reading material is in the Korean language, because judging from some of the product-package copy I've read during visits to the United States, I'd estimate that there are a dangerously large number of participles dangling all over American bathrooms.

Once when I was staying with a relative in Ohio, I innocently perused a bottle of lotion, and my hair stood on end when I read, "Rubbing in just a few drops, your skin will feel youthful and resilient." That night I had a nightmare in which my skin took on a life of its own and, leaving my body lying there in bed with its muscles (such as they are), tendons, fat deposits, and organs showing like one of those plasticized cadavers in a human-anatomy exhibit, marched into the bathroom and applied some of that lotion, all the while laughing in evil, stentorian tones that echoed throughout the house. I awoke with a start and immediately checked my skin. I was greatly relieved to find that it felt neither youthful nor resilient.

You'd think that in the space available on a credit card there wouldn't be enough room to commit this sort of error. But no. My Visa card, for some reason jumping to the conclusion that I have managed to get lost, kindly informs me that if someone finds me, I should please return to the Wooribank. I'm not making this up. Here's the direct quote: "If found, please return to Wooribank." I've checked, and apparently Visa cards the world over say this, except of course that the name of the issuing bank is different.

Okay, I know some of you out there are saying: "Come off it. Any idiot knows they mean that if you find a credit card someone has lost, you should return it to the bank that issued it." If any idiot knows that, how come the copywriter who wrote that line wasn't smart enough to say, "If you find a lost Visa card, please return it to the issuing bank"?

Having had lots of experience trying to fix such danglers myself, I can sympathize with the poor copywriter. Maybe he was a perfectionist who agonized over how to word his one chance to have a bit of his own copy carried around in the wallets of people all over the world. He might have thought: "What if someone loses her card and then later finds it again? Might she not mistakenly think she should return her own card to the bank?" In spite of the fact that any idiot would know you don't need to return your own card to the bank, he might have tried a couple dozen rewordings of the line until he gave up in despair and decided it would be easier to just go ahead and dangle the blasted participle.

Korean copywriters and editors are fortunate. They needn't suffer this sort of distress, because the Korean language has been spared the curse of participles.