"Enjoyment of" or "enjoyment by"?
A job description I am re-writing contains the words "facilitate the enjoyment of all visitors to the gallery."
To me this says that the visitors are being enjoyed, not the gallery.
Should it actually say "facilitate enjoyment of the gallery by visitors" or alternatively, "facilitate visitors' enjoyment of the gallery"?
Plenty of things we say and write everyday can have more than one interpretation. We rely more on listener's attention and recognition of context than perhaps we realise.
He walked down the street and turned into a shop, will 99.9999999% of the time mean just that. But in a book entitle The Wizard of Cleethorpes it may perhaps mean something else.
Everyone knows what facilitate the enjoyment of all visitors to the galleries means - especially in an age when the verb enjoy is being increasingly used as an intransitive verb - enjoy!
But clearly it has the capacity to be ambiguous, and would sound especially sinister if you extended the description to the job of a zoo keeper:
Shall facilitate the enjoyment of visitors to the lions and tigers.
Best version, in my view is:
Shall facilitate the visitors' enjoyment of the galleries
'Facilitate' is the kind of word which appears in job specifications, curricula vitae, etc. It sounds awkward and a wee bit pompous, but it is difficult to replace.
This post has been considerably modified from the original version, after taking on board the comment of @Edwin Ashworth - below.