Language Log

Chris Waigl is a longtime friend of Language Log — among her many accomplishments is the creation of the Eggcorn Database in 2005 (with contributions from Arnold Zwicky and me). These days she conducts post-doctoral research in the Boreal Fires team of the Alaska EPSCoR Fire and Ice project at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and she also teaches in the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics. Recently on Facebook, Chris shared an article from the Anchorage NBC affiliate, KTUU Channel 2, about the team she works with at UAF. The headline for the article is striking: "Alaskan-developed satellite technology helps fire managers in COVID-19 era."

As Vadim Temkin asked Chris on Facebook, "Why are you firing poor managers?"

Sherlocution Holmes is an entertaining UK-based Twitter presence with a bio that reads, "Consultant detective tracking down the best (and worst!) linguistics and language examples." Many of the tweets are humorous illustrations of structural or semantic ambiguity, including many examples of "crash blossoms" — those double-take headlines that are ambiguous enough to be laughably misinterpreted. Here's one popular recent tweet.

https://twitter.com/sherlocution/status/1183124303149240320

The University of New South Wales wants you to know that it's driving waste, and also recycling innovation for the world.

It's not clear what either of those activities really are, and it's not easy to construe either of them as something to boast about.

UNSW seems to be taking a contrarian stance here — "driving waste" sounds like "working to create more garbage", or maybe "carting it away by the truckload" — and "recycling innovation" seems to mean "copying others' inventions". Not your typical 21st century academic slogans.

…despite being annihilated, no less — from "A meteor from another solar system may have hit Earth, and the implications are fascinating", CNN 4/17/2019:

[h/t Bob Shackleton]

Ultimate indignity; ultimate crash blossom.

Headline in electrek:

"Tesla Model 3 driver again dies in crash with trailer, Autopilot not yet ruled out", by Fred Lambert (3/1/19)

In this case, the repeat demise would have been much more rapid than the extraordinarily prolonged one reported by Jen Viegas:

"Death Happens More Slowly Than Thought", Seeker (7/23/13), one cell at a time.

[h.t. yanggueiny]

New York Times, October 26, 2018:

Roger Lustig, commenting the headline "Paul Ryan calls on Maxine Waters to apologize" (Sunlen Serfaty and Katherine Sullivan,CNN 6/26/2018):

At first I thought he'd gone over to her house and said he was sorry.

If only.

Garden-path headline of the day — Stephen Burgen, "Fake degree claims dog prominent Spanish politicians", The Guardian 4/10/2018. By the usual rules of U.K. headlinese, it seem that the first four words should reference a dog that somehow played a key role in some fake degree claims. But no.

Here's a nice crash blossom (that is, a difficult-to-parse ambiguous headline) noted on Twitter by The Economist's Lane Greene, with credit to his colleague James Waddell. In The Financial Times, a promotion of an article inside (a "reefer" in newspaper-speak) is headlined: "Trump demands dog 'Dreamers' deal."

Via @james_waddell, a perfect example of headline ambiguity, including a verb more commonly seen as a noun, and a noun more commonly used as a verb. pic.twitter.com/lnlxE0UqPJ

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene) October 10, 2017

A tip from Twitter:

Possibly the most spectacular crashblossom I've ever seen; anyone @LanguageLog care to comment? https://t.co/yIxsolaZ65

— Tigerfort (@StripeyCaptain) September 12, 2017

The headline: "Man who urinated on woman at Drake concert before drink-drive killer girlfriend started brawl over avoids jail", The Mirror 9/11/2017:

Chad Childers, "Decapitated Members Arrested on Alleged Kidnapping Charges", Loudwire 9/10/2017. But will they be tried separately?

Yesterday, Roger Lustig sent in a snapshot of the front page of the Princeton Packet, with the observation that

Maybe free speech, even the political kind, is in greater danger than we thought!

The online version of the headline is much longer, and not ambiguous in the same way: Philip Sean Curran, "PRINCETON: Police chief resists renewed calls to stop random license plate checks, focus more on speeding", The Princeton Packet 9/28/2016.