The crash blossom of the day comes to us from Rebekah Macdonald via Twitter. This headline appeared on the New Zealand news site Stuff.co.nz:

Police chase driver in hospital

Of course, the police didn't chase a driver in a hospital, like some wacky action movie sequence. The subject of the headline is "police chase driver," a compound noun pileup typical of headlinese in the UK and other countries.  The driver had "led police in a 150 kmh chase in Lower Hutt" and landed in the hospital after crashing (!) into a power pole. We await the inevitable followup headline, "Police chase driver out of hospital."

The new Musselburgh health center, quite close to where I live in Edinburgh, is not complete; the construction process is at a standstill. The problem? According to the Scotsman newspaper's rather startling headline, it seems to be the workforce:

Man shoots dead robber, says a South African headline today. And for an instant one's confused mind asks, "It's hardly necessary to shoot the dead ones, is it?"

Geoff Nunberg sent around a link to C.W. Nevius, "Coit Tower attacks a catalyst for park crackdown",  San Francisco Chronicle 9/4/2010. The Landmark's Revenge?

Here's one sent in by Jeffrey Kallberg:

Unless you're familiar with Australian English and Australian politics, this one is going to baffle you.

In fact, I'm still somewhat baffled, even after reading (what I think is) the associated story. It may help you to know that Shorten is "federal Labor powerbroker Bill Shorten", Brumby is John Brumby, the premier of Victoria,  cops is a verb form  meaning (I think) "receives" and beating is a reference to the political defeat of an MP named Craig Langdon and/or the consequences of his resignation. Or something like that.

[Hat tip to Dave Ripley]

From Bruce Webster a few weeks ago, a report of this paper title from the journal Nature Materials early this month:

Designer spoof surface plasmon structures collimate terahertz laser beams

Not exactly an ordinary crash blossom, since it's thick with technical terminology, especially plasmon and collimate, but also spoof, which looks suspiciously like an ordinary-language word used as a technical term (since otherwise it looks totally out of place in a severely technical article).

Professor Simon Kirby (the world's only Professor of Language Evolution) regards himself as pretty good at parsing headlines on the whole, but saw one recently that completely stumped him. I agree with him; it's worse than a crash blossom, it's positively a train wreck, a scattered mess of uninterpretable short words almost all capable of more than one interpretation, the whole apparently signifying nothing. See if you can recover any reasonable meaning for this headline without reading the story:

Council hires ban bid taxi firm

An especially poetical crash blossom, which conjures up a possible surrealist horror movie: "Ghost fishing lobster traps target of study", CBC News, 7/30/2010.

(I mean, of course, the movie about the lobster fishing for ghosts, not the one about the ghost fishing for lobster.)

Arijit Guha sent along this remarkable crash blossom from the CNN website (spotted by his wife Heather):

The lead paragraph explains:

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) — A Georgia man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease says he wants to die by having his organs harvested rather than wait for his degenerative nerve ailment to kill him.

Crash blossom of the day:

While we're on the subject of grammatically ambiguous oil spill headlines, Larry Horn sends along a nice crash blossom (via the American Dialect Society mailing list). This morning's USA Today contains the headline:

BP caps ruptured well, but more hurdles remain

Larry writes:

My first thought was that I had watched the news last night and I don't remember seeing anything about the caps rupturing. Then I realized "BP caps" wasn't the subject, "ruptured" wasn't the main verb, and "well" wasn't an adverb. (I suppose if I had thought about it, it would have also occurred to me that it would be harder for a cap to rupture well than for a knee, say, to break cleanly.

We can put "BP caps" in the same file as "SNP signals debate legal threat" and "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event," wherein a noun-verb sequence is easily misparsed as a noun-noun compound ("SNP signals," "Google fans").

Whatever exactly we decide a crash blossom is, we are surely going to want to agree with James Martin, of the Department of Statistics at Oxford University, that this is one:

May axes Labour police beat pledge

James notes that every single one of these six words can serve as either a noun (sample possible senses: fifth month; woodcutting implements; opposition party; constabulary; musical timing unit; commitment) or a verb (will possibly; performs chopping; work hard; oversee; physically chastise; give a promise). So we start with 2⁶ = 64 different assignments of noun or verb status, and start sifting about for a coherent parse that gives us a meaning that could make sense in some context.