A garden-path headline from the Washington Post
« previous post | next post »
From François Lang:
I had to read the first paragraph of this article before being able to parse the headline!
What a perfect storm of ambiguity!
Selected readings
- "Garden paths galore" (1/22/24) — with long list of references
- United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE; pronounced "ice")
Mai Kuha said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:08 pm
This is great! So far, I'm counting four interpretations, if we allow the possibility of "ICE" also referring to frozen water of "damage" functioning as a verb. Are there more?
Interestingly, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini Pro all go down in flames when I ask them to specify both structures and all paraphrases. We have material for a Humanity's Last Exam question here.
Surly Duff said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:13 pm
"ICE" obviously does not refer to frozen water since it is in all caps.
And have you ever heard of someone "damaging a survey"? I haven't.
So there is only one reasonable interpretation. No ambiguity here.
Mai Kuha said,
November 26, 2025 @ 10:19 pm
Oh I totally agree with Surly Duff on the implausibility of some of those interpretations, for sure. In my experience, though, we say something is ambiguous when some context, even an implausible one, can be imagined in which an interpretation could arise. You know, in the same way as linguistics textbooks showing how the "Astronaut blamed for gas in spacecraft" is an example of four-way ambiguity, even though NASA would hardly issue a press release about employees' flatulence.
davep said,
November 26, 2025 @ 11:59 pm
The confusion/ambiguity would be reduced by a couple of hyphens.
Hyphens are never (*) used in headlines.
—————-
* it’s quite rare if not “never”.
Philip Anderson said,
November 27, 2025 @ 2:35 am
@Surly Duff
Newspaper headlines are quite capable of capitalising a single word that a normal person wouldn’t.
But it’s not so much the ambiguity of the whole clause that is the issue, as the word by word parsing, as I look for the verb: is it “storm”, is it “damage”?
David Morris said,
November 27, 2025 @ 4:37 am
From the distance of Australia, I have seen 'Ice', which could be frozen H20, crystal meth, or immigration agents.
Mai Kuha said,
November 27, 2025 @ 10:15 am
Ooh, then considering "storm" as a potential verb and "ICE" as meth, we're up to 9 interpretations!!
Victor Mair said,
November 27, 2025 @ 10:49 am
Surly Duff may be right that there is no overt ambiguity here, but I think that the WaPo headline editors were playfully flirting with it on multiple levels, as Mai Kuha and the other commenters have demonstrated with their remarks.
David Marjanović said,
November 27, 2025 @ 9:14 pm
I think they didn't notice any ambiguity; it took me a while to contrive any, and then I only came up with the theoretical possibility that the pulled workers stormed damage surveys…
Philip Taylor said,
November 29, 2025 @ 12:43 pm
I didn't find any ambiguity in the headline cited, but I find the second part of this one (from today's Washington Post) completely impossible to decipher —
V said,
November 29, 2025 @ 9:18 pm
Seemed perfectly normal to me? Got the right interpretation right away — FEMA is stopping inspections of storm damage in Chicago because they are afraid their inspectors might be abducted by ICE.
V said,
November 29, 2025 @ 9:31 pm
Like DM said, to think of an alternative reading I would really have think about it, and nothing comes up immediately.