Language Log

A note from Ambarish S.:

There’s an ongoing controversy in India with Prime Minister Modi being accused of blackface during an election campaign in the south, where people have darker skin on average. The Alert (a Hindi news website of unknown reputation) had the following Hindi sentence on it’s X:

तमिलनाडु रैली में मोदी जी का लुक वायरल!

where only the postpositions (में and का) and arguably the honorific जी are Hindi! तमिलनाडु and मोदी are proper nouns, while रैली, लुक and वायरल are respectively “rally", “look" and "viral”. The whole thing translates to “Modi Ji’s look at Tamil Nadu rally viral”.

François Lang says:

This WSJ headline garden-pathed me; I got the correct parse only on the third try!

Federal Worker Fired After Hanging Trans Flag at Yosemite Sues Government

Former Park Service employee claims free speech violations after organizing climbers for display at ‘El Cap’

By Allison Pohle, WSJ (2/23/26)

Headline on NDTV, Nov. 29, 2025: "Japan Unveils Human Washing Machine, Now You Can Get Washed Like Laundry."

From François Lang:

I had to read the first paragraph of this article before being able to parse the headline!

Breffni O'Rourke sent a link to a current news story with the headline "'Ludicrous' professors cannot be appointed – ATU President". It starts:

The inability of Technological Universities to appoint professors is causing significant regional imbalance that needs to be urgently addressed, according to the President of Atlantic Technological University (ATU), the largest university outside of Dublin.

From François Lang:

This headline (WP [11/1/24]) completely garden-pathed me–especially because of "watch strikes"!

I've rarely encountered a garden-path sentence in the wild, i.e., not in the context of a linguistic discussion of garden-path sentences.

"On Baalbek’s edges, the displaced watch strikes rain down on their city"

Philip Taylor writes:

I have read this headline over and over again, and I still have absolutely no idea of what it means.

"Sir Patrick Vallance calls for net zero to have immediacy of search for Covid vaccine"

Can you do any better before reading the full article ?

Readers may want to try their luck before they hit "Read the rest of this entry" to see my guess.

Daniel Deutsch wrote:

I had to read this headline a couple of times.

"The pandemic cost 7 million lives, but talks to prevent a repeat stall"

Is the pandemic talking? Is it trying to prevent a repeat stall?

But wait, doesn't everybody connect concepts? A.S., who sent the image, commented

This example of headlinese confused me for a bit this morning; surely it wasn’t news that our local transit provider had to think of two concepts coming together?

From Olive Long:

Here's a post containing an interesting passivization on the site formerly known as Twitter ("Philadelphia 76ers guard Kelly Oubre Jr. was a pedestrian struck by a motor vehicle in Center City"). This sort of 'split' passivization ("X was a Y V by Z" from "Z V X[, a Y].") seems at least infelicitous when X is known in the context ("The table was a piece made by Sarah" seems fine). It seems like an awkward attempt for a sports writer to put Oubre, who readers presumably care/are aware about, at the front, while still conveying that he was walking. I think "… Oubre Jr. was struck while walking by …" is obviously better, but maybe this doesn't adhere to some headlinese guidelines?

While traveling in the UK, Nancy Friedman spotted the tabloid headline "CROWN DIANA CRASH OUTRAGE" on the front page of The Sun.

https://twitter.com/Fritinancy/status/1582008092136734722

"Crash blossoms," as we've often discussed here on Language Log, are headlines that are so ambiguously phrased that they suggest alternate (comical) readings. (The headline that gave "crash blossoms" their name appeared in the newspaper Japan Today in 2009: "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms." That referred to Diana Yukawa, a violinist whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) I'm not so sure this is a canonical crash blossom, since it's difficult to get even one plausible parsing from this headline, unless you're well-versed in the British journalistic tradition of "noun-pile heds," another frequent LL topic (see past posts here).

Ruki Sayid & Ben Glaze, "Boris Johnson returns from Saudi Arabia empty handed after flop oil beg trip",  The Mirror 3/17/2022:

Boris Johnson is landing back in Britain empty-handed this morning after his oil begging trip to the Gulf flopped – and Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West.

Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine has fuelled price hikes with a litre of unleaded now more than £1.60, piling misery on British families already struggling with household bills.