Language Log

An especially poetical crash blossom, which conjures up a possible surrealist horror movie: "Ghost fishing lobster traps target of study", CBC News, 7/30/2010.

(I mean, of course, the movie about the lobster fishing for ghosts, not the one about the ghost fishing for lobster.)

Arijit Guha sent along this remarkable crash blossom from the CNN website (spotted by his wife Heather):

The lead paragraph explains:

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) — A Georgia man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease says he wants to die by having his organs harvested rather than wait for his degenerative nerve ailment to kill him.

Crash blossom of the day:

While we're on the subject of grammatically ambiguous oil spill headlines, Larry Horn sends along a nice crash blossom (via the American Dialect Society mailing list). This morning's USA Today contains the headline:

BP caps ruptured well, but more hurdles remain

Larry writes:

My first thought was that I had watched the news last night and I don't remember seeing anything about the caps rupturing. Then I realized "BP caps" wasn't the subject, "ruptured" wasn't the main verb, and "well" wasn't an adverb. (I suppose if I had thought about it, it would have also occurred to me that it would be harder for a cap to rupture well than for a knee, say, to break cleanly.

We can put "BP caps" in the same file as "SNP signals debate legal threat" and "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event," wherein a noun-verb sequence is easily misparsed as a noun-noun compound ("SNP signals," "Google fans").

Whatever exactly we decide a crash blossom is, we are surely going to want to agree with James Martin, of the Department of Statistics at Oxford University, that this is one:

May axes Labour police beat pledge

James notes that every single one of these six words can serve as either a noun (sample possible senses: fifth month; woodcutting implements; opposition party; constabulary; musical timing unit; commitment) or a verb (will possibly; performs chopping; work hard; oversee; physically chastise; give a promise). So we start with 2⁶ = 64 different assignments of noun or verb status, and start sifting about for a coherent parse that gives us a meaning that could make sense in some context.

It's been suggested by some commenters that the headline discussed in this post of mine isn't really a crash blossom; see Boris, for example. What's the definition, then? Boris thinks crash blossoms must "have a possible reading with the intended meaning". But I think my case satisfies that criterion.

Poor Bethany Lott; poor Richard Butler, who would have married her; and poor headline writer who penned this appalling crash blossom:

Bethany Lott killed while being proposed to by a lightning strike in Knoxville

Bethany was not proposed to by a lightning strike. She would have been proposed to by her boyfriend Richard Butler, who took her hiking in the North Carolina mountains that she loved and planned to pop the question when they reached the top. Three lightning strikes homed in on them, and the third scored a direct hit, killing her and wounding him. The story is here. And what a disaster of a headline it got.

RESPA overcharges dead in the Ninth Circuit, says the headline of the brief news item at this page on Lexology, a news site for business lawyers.

But don't worry about the fleecing of the deceased; it was just a crash blossom, sent in by Edward M. "Ted" McClure, the Faculty Services Law Librarian at the Phoenix School of Law.

When Bob LeDrew sent in the headline "Other medical isotope cuts wait in Ottawa", I figured that it really meant something like "earlier attempts to cut spending on medical isotopes may not be enough, and so the Canadian national government has contingency plans to reduce expenditures further", while allowing the humorous misinterpretation that an alternative choice of isotope is reducing delays in the capital city.

But I was wrong, as the article's opening shows:

"NY man seeking help for stray dog arrested for DWI", AP, 5/30/2010.

A nice nominal-compound crash blossom was spotted by Nicholas Widdows on a BBC News web page:

Missing women police find remains

Like Missing comma, police decide to hire a grammarian, or Missing his mom, Joe called home? No, wait a minute, this isn't about the police missing womanly company — those first two words are not a gerund-participial predicative adjunct. Could missing be a modifier of women police, then? The remains were found in a remote area by some female police officers who had been reported as missing? A bit implausible. What about find? Is that really a tensed verb with plural agreement? Could it be a noun instead (as in a new find), with remains being the main clause verb, as in Paul Simon's line the roots of rhythm remain? No; it's not making any sense at all. You just can't figure out a plausible story.

Hangzhou seems to be blessed with an abundance of droll Chinglish signs, as we've seen recently on Language Log.

However, if you find yourself in Hangzhou and you keep your eyes open, you'll discover that there are also some unintentionally humorous Chinese signs, such as this one:

If you knew the background, you could see this one coming: "Welcome Replaces Costly for Honduras", NYT 5/10/2010: