Take off that broccoli!
From Stephen Dodson:
It took me a minute to parse this headline correctly:
Bill Pennington, "‘Like Putting on Broccoli,’ or Cauliflower, and Results Are Bumpy", NYT 6/20/2015.
Archive for Crash blossoms
Prompt Angst
Emily Cahn, "Sanchez Stumbles Prompt SoCal Angst", Roll Call 5/20/2015 — Linda Seebach writes "I lived in LA for a couple of years, and can readily believe that SoCal angst is unusually prompt to appear."
Shooting all members of biker gangs
A headline writer is apparently economizing on punctuation: Nomaan Merchant, "Police: 9 dead in Texas shooting all members of biker gangs", MyFoxDetroit (AP).
Slut shames students
Jen Chung, "CT High School Slut Shames Students Over "Inappropriate" Prom Dresses", Gothamist 5/12/2015:
Female students at a Connecticut High School are furious that dresses bought for this weekend's prom are being banned because they have exposed shoulders, backs, sides and legs. One mother—whose daughter had two dresses rejected—said, "They've suggested the girls wear T-shirts under their dresses. My daughter won't wear a T-shirt. She would be mortified."
Dead and marching
Neil MacFarquar, "A Parade Hailing Russia’s World War II Dead and Marching Further From the West", NYT 5/7/2015.
This should be easy, given the parallelism "hailing … and marching", but parallelism isn't always enough.
Crash blossom roundup
"Crash blossoms" — those ambiguously phrased headlines that encourage absurd interpretations — are flourishing like never before. Here's a roundup of the latest specimens spotted in the wild.
1. "Matt Cassel trade a simple, cheap bandage for Bills QB problem" (CBS Sports, Mar. 4, 2015)
Oscar crash blossom
Attachment ambiguity strikes again! Originally the headline was "Screenwriter Graham Moore reveals he tried to commit suicide during 2015 Oscars acceptance speech for 'The Imitation Game'". Now it's "Screenwriter Graham Moore reveals during Oscars acceptance speech for 'The Imitation Game' that he tried to commit suicide at 16", Daily News 2/23/2015. Read the rest of this entry »
Attachment ambiguity of the day
Prepositional phrase attachment is one of the hardest things for English parsers to get right: if I hit a man with a bag of groceries, was that bag of groceries the instrument of my action, or was it just something the guy was carrying when I attacked him?
And PP-attachment ambiguity is especially common in English-language headlines, since omitted forms of to be add additional ambiguous attachment points.
For example, Alex Barker, "EU reforms to break up big banks at risk", Financial Times 1/29/2015: Are the reforms at risk, or are the reforms on track to break up banks that are at risk?
Tweet Chinese Fired
Jose Pagliery and Frank Pallotta, "Hacked news companies tweet Chinese fired on U.S. warship", CNN 1/16/2015:
[h/t Dmitri Ostrovsky]
Computers to become 10 times more powerful in 2015
With respect to to a headline in the Washington Post yesterday (Jason Samenow, "Weather Service forecasting computers to become 10 times more powerful in 2015", Washington Post 1/5/2015), Eugene Volokh writes:
My first thought: Come now – how would computers generally become 10 times more powerful just in the span of a year? (In the span of five years, according to Moore’s law, maybe).
My second thought: Since when is the Weather Service forecasting trends in computing technology?
My third thought, shamefully after I clicked on the link: Ah, it’s the Service’s computers used for forecasting that are going to be upgraded to top-of-the-line models.
