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.

This headline puzzled me:

I interpreted it as

Doctors are showing a buried CDC report to top White House officials

And I wondered, what was that report? and why did the CDC bury it? And who are the doctors digging it up?

What the headline actually meant, of course, was

Documents show that top White House officials buried a CDC report

which makes much more sense in the current environment.

A recent NYT headline seems like the premise for a particularly dark dystopian movie: Emily Oster, "Only Children Are Not Doomed", NYT 4/27/2020. A sort of cross between 12 Monkeys and Lord of the Flies? No:

The coronavirus pandemic has created a lot of confusion, but it also may bring into focus a question many parents (or expectant parents) ask: What is the right number of kids for my family? Quarantine or not, having siblings shapes one’s experiences and development. On balance, is this for good or for ill? […]

Overall, when it comes to what economists call success, having siblings simply does not seem to matter.

But what about the awkward only child? The data has largely rejected that idea for decades. One 1987 review article, which summaries 140 studies, found some evidence of more “academic motivation” among only children, but no differences on personality traits like extroversion. In other words, although you might expect a built-in playmate makes a kid more social, the data doesn’t bear that out.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

This headline sent me down the garden path for a couple of seconds:

This Washington Post item confused me for a few seconds:

I first interpreted the headline as "Donald Trump is confident that Roger Stone is guilty on all counts, and" (whoops) "he (=Trump) faces up to 50 years in prison"?

I was sent down this particular garden path by the recent flurry of news stories about the president throwing various supporters under the metaphorical bus. But the whole -ant v. -ent mess didn't help.

British headline-syntax example of the week: "Sheffield deaths: House murders accused mother in court", BBC News 5/27/2019.

The link was sent in by H. Kepponen, who notes that

the story is not about a domestic residence killing a woman inside a courtroom with malice aforethought, but about a mother who has been charged with murdering two of her children in a house … and who was brought to court today.

"The Lost Harvest of Chinese Food Plants in Venezuela", By José González Vargas, Caracas Chronicles (May 11, 2019)

A headline sent in by Yoram Meroz: "Congressman Florida Man hired former Trump staffer fired after hanging around white nationalists", Daily Kos 4/19/2019.

Yoram wrote "Here's a headline I could probably decipher, but I haven't tried."

I tried and failed — I leave it to our clever commenters to solve the mystery.

The references are easy to understand, from the body of the story and extensive other coverage — the "Florida Man" is Matt Gaetz, and the "former Trump staffer" is Darren Beattie.

Headline in the Washington Post (a few minutes ago):

A professor at China’s permier university questioned Xi Jinping. Then he was suspended.

Obligatory screenshot:

As opposed to the salubrious kind, presumably….

FOX 5 DC News (3/3/19) headline:

"Fairfax County police identify victims of deadly triple homicide in Springfield"

Fairfax County police have identified the three people found shot dead at a home in Springfield overnight.

As Bob Dylan and Paula Cole might have sung, "Where have all the editors gone …"

[h.t. Don Keyser]

From today’s Financial Times:

I think they meant "anti-anti-Semitism ceremony".

[h.t. Donald Clarke]

For the last few weeks, the New York Times has been running a hyped-up, gushing series of lengthy articles under the rubric "China rules". On a special section in the paper edition for Sunday, November 25, they printed this gigantic headline in Chinese characters — and made a colossal mistake: