Language Log

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.

A crashblossom headline with an actual crash! pic.twitter.com/ZNfXUelGLr

— Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy) October 17, 2022

"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.

The current xkcd:

The mouseover title: "Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely."

A striking example of the post-modifier attachment ambiguity: "Police officer jailed for attacking members of the public found dead", The Guardian 12/29/2021.

Bob Ladd, who sent in the link, spent "quite a few hundred milliseconds" puzzling about why the police officer had attacked dead people.

Johnson, in the Economist (5/7/21), has an enjoyable article:  "Some languages are harder to learn than others — but not for the obvious reasons".

Here's the first part of the article:

When considering which foreign languages to study, some people shy away from those that use a different alphabet. Those random-looking squiggles seem to symbolise the impenetrability of the language, the difficulty of the task ahead.

So it can be surprising to hear devotees of Russian say the alphabet is the easiest part of the job. The Cyrillic script, like the Roman one, has its origins in the Greek alphabet. As a result, some letters look the same and are used near identically. Others look the same but have different pronunciations, like the p in Cyrillic, which stands for an r-sound. For Russian, that cuts the task down to only about 20 entirely new characters. These can comfortably be learned in a week, and soon mastered to the point that they present little trouble. An alphabet, in other words, is just an alphabet. A few tricks aside (such as the occasional omission of vowels), other versions do what the Roman one does: represent sounds.

A headline from today's BBC News: "Knife crime: St John Ambulance to teach teens to help stab victims."

From BobW:

"Saw this and immediately thought of Language Log. Whatever are they doing with all those spree trails?":

"With Deutsche Bank’s help, an oligarch’s buying spree trails ruin across the US heartland

I think that most people encountering this string of oddly concatenated words would stop and do a double take as they try to make sense of it:  "oligarch’s buying spree trails ruin".  With my eyeballs whirling around in my head, I thought:  whatever are they trying to say?  But then I calmed down and recollected that the hardest word, "spree", is one that I had myself used in a Yuletide greeting in 2013.  With "spree" (a sudden outburst of activity) nailed down in the center, the other words fell into place.

"Female snipers in challenging filed operation"

Photo essay in China Military (8/30/20).

Below are the captions for the five photographs in the essay.  The scary, creepy, bizarre photographs are omitted in this post, but may be seen at this link, where you can also see the headline cited above.

This one depends on word-sense ambiguity rather than on the structural and part-of-speech issues in the ambiguous headlines we've called crash blossoms. "After 9 months, women’s body to get new head", Times of India 8/26/2020:

Nine months after being headless and non-functional, the Goa State Commission for Women is set to get a new chairperson. Minister for women and child development Vishwajit Rane on Tuesday said that a formal notification is being moved to appoint Vidya Gaude to the post.

Or is it five nouns, a verb, and two more nouns? "Napa wildfire LNU Lightning Complex Gamble Hennessey Fire – August 2020", SFGate 8/18/2020.

"Napa" is the county; "wildfire" is obvious; "LNU" turns out to stand for "Lake-Napa-Unit" but the initialism is obviously a thing even if we don't know what it means; "Lightning" is what started all the fires recently in California; "Complex" might be the head of a phrase "LNU Lightning Complex" (and that turns out to be right); "Hennessey" is another proper name.

But "Gamble" puzzled me. Is it another place name, or a description of a fire-fighting tactic, or what? And what's the structure of the sequence "Napa wildfire LNU Lightning Complex Gamble Hennessey Fire"?

The story is just a series of captioned slides, in which "Gamble" doesn't occur. So that didn't help.

David Denison writes:

This ludicrous headline in my Feedly feed caught my eye just now: "Learning wild to swim with confidence".

The actual story in The Guardian revealed an alternative version, usable but (to my ears) still in over-anxious thrall to the don't-split-infinitives mantra: "Learning to swim wild with confidence".

I think I'd have naturally said "Learning to wild swim with confidence", though with some hesitation in writing as to whether to hyphenate wild-swim.