Why is it a “Dangling participle,” not independent, disconnected, isolated or alike participle?

When you open an English grammar book written in Japanese, you’d be puzzled or even chuckle to find Japanese translation of dangling participle – 懸垂分詞, which literally means ‘chinning exercise’ or ‘chin-up’ particle. It shows ‘Lying in my bed, everything seemed so different’ as an example.

I don’t know who put ‘chin-up participle’ to dangling particle as its Japanese counterpart. At least it was named this way by an English language scholar(s) at the dawn of civilization and enlightment in Meiji era (1868 – 1911).

However, I feel somewhat foreign about the naming of ‘dangling participle’ per se in comparison with present / past participle. Why was it defined as “Dangling participle”?

Yes, it’s a custom, consensus, and it's the rule that you can not argue about. But I feel same awkwardness as I feel with ‘chinning exercise participle.” I thought there would have been easier and more understandable choices of the terminology than Dangling, for instances, independent, disconnected, isolated, bipolar, parallel participle, you can name it.

What was the origin of “Dangling participle,” and why was it named this way?

Solution 1:

Book links found at the ngrams for dangling participle show that incidence of the term in printed literature was insignificant before 1917. Indeed, google books shows no occurrences of "dangling participle" in books printed from 1800 through 1916. However, Efficient composition: a college rhetoric, by Arthur Huntington Nason, 1917, shows numerous instances of the term. On page 110 Nason refers to "a freshman theme on Emphasis" as the source of the paragraph at the top of page 111, a paragraph he then proceeds to revise three times, for "emphasis", "repetition", and "sound". One speculates the term "dangling participle" fled heedless from that unknown freshman's pen and via Nason's opus then blossomed in hundreds of American high school and college grammar books in the following decade.

Solution 2:

A "dangling participle" is also known as a "dangling modifier" or simply a "dangler" by different people.

On the contrary, I find the term very apt because the name "dangling" was meant to point out how it doesn't connect with what it is supposed to.

For the Japanese translation though, I don't know much about that language to make a guess why the Meiji scholars named it that way.

I suppose it's because, technically, a "dangler" isn't a grammatical unit by itself and it's just a common mistake that people make. So you can still call it an "+ing clause" or by the other standard grammar terms, and then just add the description that it's "unclear" what it's modifying.