Language Log

It's been suggested by some commenters that the headline discussed in this post of mine isn't really a crash blossom; see Boris, for example. What's the definition, then? Boris thinks crash blossoms must "have a possible reading with the intended meaning". But I think my case satisfies that criterion.

Poor Bethany Lott; poor Richard Butler, who would have married her; and poor headline writer who penned this appalling crash blossom:

Bethany Lott killed while being proposed to by a lightning strike in Knoxville

Bethany was not proposed to by a lightning strike. She would have been proposed to by her boyfriend Richard Butler, who took her hiking in the North Carolina mountains that she loved and planned to pop the question when they reached the top. Three lightning strikes homed in on them, and the third scored a direct hit, killing her and wounding him. The story is here. And what a disaster of a headline it got.

RESPA overcharges dead in the Ninth Circuit, says the headline of the brief news item at this page on Lexology, a news site for business lawyers.

But don't worry about the fleecing of the deceased; it was just a crash blossom, sent in by Edward M. "Ted" McClure, the Faculty Services Law Librarian at the Phoenix School of Law.

When Bob LeDrew sent in the headline "Other medical isotope cuts wait in Ottawa", I figured that it really meant something like "earlier attempts to cut spending on medical isotopes may not be enough, and so the Canadian national government has contingency plans to reduce expenditures further", while allowing the humorous misinterpretation that an alternative choice of isotope is reducing delays in the capital city.

But I was wrong, as the article's opening shows:

"NY man seeking help for stray dog arrested for DWI", AP, 5/30/2010.

A nice nominal-compound crash blossom was spotted by Nicholas Widdows on a BBC News web page:

Missing women police find remains

Like Missing comma, police decide to hire a grammarian, or Missing his mom, Joe called home? No, wait a minute, this isn't about the police missing womanly company — those first two words are not a gerund-participial predicative adjunct. Could missing be a modifier of women police, then? The remains were found in a remote area by some female police officers who had been reported as missing? A bit implausible. What about find? Is that really a tensed verb with plural agreement? Could it be a noun instead (as in a new find), with remains being the main clause verb, as in Paul Simon's line the roots of rhythm remain? No; it's not making any sense at all. You just can't figure out a plausible story.

Hangzhou seems to be blessed with an abundance of droll Chinglish signs, as we've seen recently on Language Log.

However, if you find yourself in Hangzhou and you keep your eyes open, you'll discover that there are also some unintentionally humorous Chinese signs, such as this one:

If you knew the background, you could see this one coming: "Welcome Replaces Costly for Honduras", NYT 5/10/2010:

The top headline in the Business section of BBC News currently reads:

Greece fears batter markets again

Sean Purdy, who sent this one in to Language Log Plaza, writes, "However hard I try to parse this correctly, I cannot suppress the mental image of traders buying and selling the raw materials for Yorkshire pud – and scaring the Greeks in the process."

This Yahoo News headline shocked Bethany M.: "Women, girls rape victims in Haiti quake aftermath", 3/16/2010.

Although recent Language Log posts about crash blossoms have focused primarily on newspaper headlines, this phenomenon is even more important in messages written to warn customers about immanent hazards, where the same readability problems exist, but with heightened significance. For example, this one recently appeared on a Montana gasoline pump dispensing unit.

STATIC ELECTRIC SPARK

EXPLOSION HAZARD

A really good crash blossom slows down even a fast reader who is a professional grammarian with a lot of experience in rapid reprocessing of garden-path ambiguities. And this one (New York Times, March 8; thanks to Helenmary Sheridan) is a really good one, which they might better have rephrased:

Google's Computer Might Betters Translation Tool

Took me a full extra second or two (and that is a long time in sentence processing) to find the main clause verb.

The crash blossom of the day, at least here in the part of Scotland known as the Lothians, must surely be "Number of Lothian patients made ill by drinking rockets", in the Edinburgh Evening News today. Would you drink a rocket? I'm sure you would sensibly say it depends what the ingredients are. You wouldn't just down a rocket if I fixed one for you in the cocktail shaker, would you?

Only slowly, as one ploughs through the article looking for more details of these rocket beverages that have wrecked the health of so many in the Lothians, does it dawn on you that you have made a major mistake in syntactic analysis. Try making rocket the main verb instead.

[Hat tip: sharp-eyed Language Log reader Kenneth MacKenzie.]