Language Log

Last week, I came across what I thought was an artful headline in my local paper (Calgary Herald; 03/21/1012):

Police looking into death by Balzac

What reader wouldn't be lured into dipping further into this article, into wondering what human tragedy or comedy awaits in the finer print? Are we to be treated to the investigation of a lurid, long-unsolved murder committed by one of the fathers of literary realism? A horrible accident involving a tome flung from a high-rise balcony? Someone suffering an asthma attack after reading a suffocating passage of nineteenth-century French prose?

"Chinese cooking fat heads for Holland", DutchNews.nl 3/27/2012.

Today's crash blossom likely involves multiple aborted landings:

Romney wins mask lingering questions about his candidacy

Since the word wins occurs much more often as a verb than as a noun, you have a good excuse if you needed to take several runs at this one. Just what exactly did Romney win? A rubber Ronald Reagan mask? A mask-lingering contest? The right to ask or answer questions about lingering masks? It takes some untangling of the parser to get to the intended reading where Romney wins is the compound noun subject of the verb phrase mask lingering questions about his candidacy.

Bad enough as a headline, but CNN's website has a nasty setup. By the time you've finally sorted out the main headline, you then have to contend with the "Breaking News" headline in the embedded video:

"Does Donald Trump support matter?", Special Report w/ Bret Baier, Fox News 2/2/2012. John Crowley's reponse:

Well what's the alternative, thought I.  Denouncing matter?  Indifference to matter?   The Gnostics used to argue over it…

Crash blossom of the week: "Don't help old, blind council tells parking officers", The Age 2/1/2012.

Aspects of the Finnish language happen to have come up a couple of times in recent weeks on Language Log ("Rare Finnish Crash Blossom", 1/13/2012; "It's baaack . . . and upside-down!", 1/2/2012). Lauri Karttunen, from whom I learned a bit about Finnish when I was a grad student, sent in these comments:

I did not know the technical term "crash blossom."  The equivalent term in Finnish is "kielikukkanen" (language flower). They are not rare in Finnish. The monthly "Suomen Kuvalehti" always has a couple in their column "Jyviä ja akanoita" (Seeds and Chaff).

This one isn't ambiguous, as far as I can tell — it just doesn't mean what the headline writer wanted it to mean: "Buried Alive Fiance Gets 20 Years in Prison", ABC News 1/13/2012.

From Miika Sillanpää:

A Finnish tabloid presented this beautiful crash blossom today:

Disregarding the tragic subject, it can be read either as
"Father kills his daughter's dog with hammer"
OR
"Father kills his daughter with dog's hammer"

Well-tended crash blossoms such as this are exceedingly rare in the Finnish-language media, so it was a pretty delightful find on this grim and dark Friday the 13th. Though I wonder where the dog had gotten the hammer in the first place.

Google Translate presents another possibility (I think incorrectly): "The father of her daughter's dog was killed with a hammer".

Before reading further, consider the following newspaper headline, and make a mental note of what you think the article is about:

Headline from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Are some consultants funding their salary increases by tracking things — maybe by tracking *us*? Has something been revealed about a raise awarded to the consultants to "tracking funds", whatever those might be?

Courtesy of Stephen Bullon in East Sussex, here's a headline to test your crash blossom mettle:

Bright sparks weather gala night power cut to party on

Stephen didn't send a scan, and the article doesn't appear (yet?) on the paper's web site, but apparently it was actually printed in the physical version. It took me four or five readings to figure out what (I think) it means.

Paul Sleigh writes about a headline from the Scientific American website:

I actually felt my brain stretching as I read this one: "Doorway to Blame for Room Amnesia".  Is it a report on the opportunity for recrimination for some kind of space-related memory loss?

<doorway to <blame for <room amnesia>>

Or the loss of memory about a wall entrance leading to guilt regarding part of a house?

<<doorway to <blame for room>> amnesia>

I briefly flirted with the idea that someone with the surname Room was suffering brain injury after hitting his head on a lintel:

<doorway to blame for <[Mr or Ms] Room['s] amnesia>>

… but that seemed unlikely.

BBC News is a reliable source for the misleading headlines we know as crash blossoms (e.g., here, here, here). The latest comes to us via a Twitter tip from Ben Lillie, who retweeted Mikko Hypponen's double-take: "What took down the US drone? Iranian TV shows did! Or maybe I'm misreading this." Here's the headline:

Iranian TV shows downed US drone

And here's the full story, in case you're still stumped. [Update: Judging from the comments, it's not much of a stumper.]