What an elephant was doing in my pajamas, I'll never know.
Image borrowed from Paula J. Becker, who has a really cute blog.
The point of this extremely lame joke is that I killed a fly with a spoon last week.
Not that the fly had a spoon in its little fly hand. Although it might have, for all I could tell, since fly hands are normally microscopic and my vision isn't too sharp, even with glasses. And for that matter, it was a pretty big fly. As flies go. So it's possible that the bigger-than-normal fly did have a demitasse spoon in its hand with which it intended to stir cream and sugar into its iced coffee.
In any case, I saw no evidence of a spoon in the fly's hand as I picked up the spoon with which I swatted the fly.
The point? The point is that when writing a letter to Cupcake at camp, I wrote "I killed a fly with a spoon last week." And then I had to clarify my statement because the way it was written it appeared as if I might have killed a fly that was holding a spoon in its hand, which we have already established was not the case, and in any case would be most unlikely.
As I was telling this story to my sister (an instinctive grammarian, like me -- it runs in the family, like prominent noses and curly hair), we tried to dissect the sentence and figure out what was wrong with it and how to fix it.
But we couldn't find anything grammatically amiss.
"I killed a fly with a spoon" seemed to be completely proper, especially if the sentence were spoken rather than written. If, in conversation, you say "I killed a fly with a spoon," your listener, while finding your choice of subject rather grotesque, should nevertheless understand the implication that you picked up a spoon in your hand and used the spoon to swat a fly, which fell down dead on the floor.
Yet, the written sentence begged to be restructured so as to make abundantly clear that the fly was killed with the spoon, not that the fly came equipped with its own fly-size spoon.
Can anyone explain this conundrum to me? In a way that won't make my eyes roll back into my head and my knees to buckle, thus causing me to fall backwards on the floor, bash my skull and end up in bed for a week with hallucinations of flies stirring coffee in china cups using teeny tiny silver spoons?
Thanks.
