Language Log

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.

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.