Language Log

Quick!

How do you parse this headline?

"Resisting reunification by force to get Taiwan nowhere: mainland spokesperson" (Xinhua, 5/25/17)

"Corpse sex kill threat prisoner gets 45 year sentence", BBC 12/14/2016.

This is a case where even after reading the story, the structure is unclear.

Is it [[[corpse sex] [kill threat]] prisoner] ?

Or [[[corpse [sex kill]] threat]] prisoner] ?

Or has the BBC decided, in this post-truth era, to go post-syntax as well?

Philip Cummings, who sent in the link, commented that

I call these ‘noun car crashes’ particularly when I have to attempt to translate them into Irish and work out the appropriate case relationships between the various nouns.

From Eric Smith:

"Police appeal after teenage girls kissed and touched in alleged bus incident", Isle of Wight County Press, 3/24/2016.

In today's enlightened society, why shouldn't teenage girls kiss and touch?

I think this illustrates that, in a British headline

* if a verb form is ambiguous as between a preterite tense and a past participle, the past participle is probably what is meant;

* if the syntax is ambiguous as between a standard sentence and an abbreviated sentence, the abbreviated sentence is probably what is meant.

As a secondary point, I suspect that "appeal" is intended as a noun, so that "Police appeal" is a nominal and not a clause.

Funny headline on a Yahoo news story: "Ford stops using Takata air bag inflators in future vehicles". To me that says that they used to use Takata air bags in future vehicles. How did that work?

From Alon Lischinsky:

In "Brit noun pile heds quizzed" (3/5/2009), you wondered when did British news media start writing headlines as long, complex noun compounds.

While I have nothing resembling a clear answer, I've just noticed that it must go back to the 1930s at least. In "The Professor's Manuscript", one of the stories published in her 1939 collection In the Teeth of the Evidence, Dorothy Sayers makes what's obviously an allusion to common practice:

Mr. Egg brought his mind back—a little unwillingly— from the headlines in his morning paper ("screen star's marriage romance plane dash"—"continent comb-out for missing financier"—"country-house mystery blaze arson suspicions"—"budget income-tax remission possibility"), and wondered who Professor Pindar might be when he was at home.

Items 1, 3 and 4 in the list are perfect examples of the sort of headline you discussed in that post. If only item 2 had been “missing financier continent comb-out”…

Well, almost: Mark Kinver, "Citizen science charts horse chestnut tree pest spread", BBC News 1/24/2014. Though charts might have been a plural noun, it's clearly a verb in this case, alas. The headline writer missed the chance for a genuine 8-element noun pile, e.g. "Citizen science horse chestnut tree pest spread tally".

Still, British headline interpretation continues to be good practice for reading classical Chinese poetry.

Katia Dmitrieva, "Madonna addicted to sweat dance plugs Toronto condos: Mortgages", Bloomberg News 1/10/2014 — Reader CD, a hardened journalistic veteran, calls this "a rare American noun pile headline":

It’s a spectacular garden path which turns out to be a noun pile. I’m pretty good at parsing headlinese but I had no idea what the story was supposed to be about, or even what the syntax was supposed to be, until I clicked through. I suppose it would have helped if I’d known the name of the song beforehand. I’m quite impressed by the flimsiness of the connection between the lead and the content of the story too, but that’s another matter.  

On the nationality question, it’s a Canadian story and possibly a Canadian writer, but Bloomberg has a very strict style guide for headlines regardless of jurisdiction, so I’m comfortable calling it American.

Joe Manfre writes:

I was looking through a Flickr group celebrating the always sensationalist headlines for the Argus newspaper in Brighton and Hove,  and in it I found a few pretty good noun piles:

FIREWORKS BLAZE BOSS VERDICT
HOVE GARDEN POND CLASH – PICTURE
BLAZE DEATH MURDER QUIZ
DOG KNIFE KILLING VERDICT
BRIGHTON COCKROACH CURRY HOUSE FINE
BRIGHTON PHOTO STUDIO JOBS MISERY

We can add:

SURF GIRLS' BEACH BATTLE
WORTHING RUNAWAY ELECTRIC BUGGY CHAOS

(though "electric" is an adjective, really), and

RUBBISH ROW RESIDENTS IN VILE CARDS SHOCK

(though that is two three-element noun piles connected with a preposition).

…submitted by Jesse Sheidlower: "China Ferrari sex orgy death crash".

Emma Little, "Fish foot spa virus bombshell", The Sun, 10/18/2011.

[h/t John Coleman]

SC, a native reader of British headlinese, was baffled by the noun pile-up "Coin change 'skin problem fear'" on the BBC News web site, because he hadn't previously encountered the story.

Fans of noun piles will enjoy the recent blog post by Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, "Fun (or not) with noun stacks." Mike shares a few of the lovely compound noun pileups he's encountered on the job:

• data bound control table row action links
• failed password security question answer attempts limit
• reduced minimum OS partition space available requirement

Mike goes on to explain why he thinks these problematic constructions continue to crop up in technical writing, driven by imperatives of terseness and concision at the expense of comprehensibility. He also gives helpful advice for untangling technical noun piles into something more user-friendly. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder just how deeply enmeshed in nerdview a writer must be to produce a whopper like "failed password security question answer attempts limit."