I recently read, and enjoyed, David Owen’s “The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve” (January 2023). The objectionable practice in question is what Fowler calls the “sentry participle,” a participle or appositive stuck on the front of a sentence that could just as well have done without it. For example:

Known affectionately as “the girls,” Ruth and Emily have a lot of fun for two Asian elephants.

Often associated with newspaper obituaries and puff pieces, the practice is (Owen says) relatively new to English. Er, ahem: Owen says this particular practice is relatively new to English, having gained currency from the kind of “journalese” seen in newspaper obituaries and puff pieces only since the early 20th century.

I hypothesize (or admit) that the use of sentry participles might be a symptom of the writer’s failing to think out the whole sentence before starting to write. Instead of thinking in full sentences, you can start with just a participial phrase — the kind of thing you’d see in a bulleted list on a PowerPoint slide — and defer for a few seconds the unpleasant task of turning that bullet point into a full sentence.

The awkwardness is obvious if you imagine hearing one in conversation. No one has ever said to you, “A sophomore at Cornell, my niece is coming home for Christmas.” […] Yet if you were, let’s say, writing an obituary for your college’s alumni magazine, you wouldn’t hesitate: “A standout schoolboy athlete, he ran his family’s door-and-window business.”

Today, via Language Log posts on the purported etymology of “limerick” (April 2017) and orthographical limericks (August 2008), and this circa-2000 time capsule of the Old Web:

The Baron of Fawsley, Lord St John,
Had a fine buckskin coat with a frt john.
He said, “It was guthven
Me by Viscount Ruthven—
Who must think I’m a cowboy, or t john.”

The same page introduced me to the following bit of doggerel from Robert Graves’ (yes, that Robert Graves’) otherwise inutile 1951 collection Poems and Satires. The following, which reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe (in the way it combines “A Predicament” ’s addlepated excess with “The Domain of Arnheim” ’s kublakhanity) is printed under the title “¡Wellcome, to the Caves of Arta!”

“They are hollowed out in the see coast at the muncipal terminal of Capdepera, at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a suporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, which prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called «The Spiders». There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their elegy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.”
  [From a tourist leaflet.]

Such subtle filigranity and nobless of construccion
  Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.
While all admit their impotence (though autors most formidable)
  To sing in words the excellence of Nature’s underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb langage
  Make hymnes to God which celebrate the stregnth of water drops.

¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom
  Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?
Already in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Arta
  The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupefied;
So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums
  And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.

From darkness into darkness, but at measure now descending,
  You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;
«The Saloon of Thousand Banners», or «The Tumba of Napoleon»,
  «The Grotto of the Rosary», «The Club», «The Camping Tent»,
And at «Cavern of the Organs» there are knocking streange formacions
  Which give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.

Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,
  The every of stalactites will make you stop and stay.
Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrills aprehending
  An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.
It is poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,
  Which deceased of their emocion on a past excursion day.