From a January 11 Washington Post story about the expanded use by police departments of nosy technology:
For years, dozens of departments used devices that can hoover up all cellphone data in an area without search warrants.
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An area without search warrants? No, that’s not what the writer means. He means:
For years, dozens of departments, without search warrants, used devices that can hoover up all cellphone data in an area.
When a phrase qualifies a term elsewhere in a sentence, you’re best off letting the qualifier hug the term that’s being modified.
(The Post sentence has an interesting verb: hoover. I couldn’t find it in my five dictionaries, but the Online Etymology Dictionary recalled that the makers of Hoover vacuum cleaners, in their 1926 advertising, used hoover as a verb, meaning to vacuum. I sense it’s a Britishism.)
—Mike Feinsilber
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