When you read this Radio Free Asia headline, what do you think? "China Holds Two Activists Linked to Heilongjiang Shooting Death" (5/20/15) Here's the photograph that accompanies the article: Activist Wu Gan stages protest outside Jiangxi High Court, May 19, 2015. Photo courtesy of Boxun.
"Blindfold sex knife attack ex-wife jailed for murder attempt", BBC News 12/8/2014 — Although the five-noun pile-up doesn't give us any syntactic help, the facts are more or less what you'd guess by putting all the words on the table and making up a story about them: A woman who tried to murder her ex-husband after blindfolding him […]
The newspaper headline interpretation confusion problem is usually associated with noun piles: "Coin change 'skin problem fear'", ""Ben Douglas Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown 'sorry'", "China Ferrari sex orgy death crash", and so on. But here's one that depends on ambiguity in the attachment of a pile-up of three headline-final subordinate clauses — Richard […]
Bloomberg News is notorious for its bizarre, impenetrable headlines. There's a whole Tumblr blog devoted to strange Bloomberg headlines, and Quartz last year ran an article looking into "how Bloomberg headlines got to be so odd." Here's a new one, spotted by David Craig and Brett Wilson:
Chris Hanretty, "British headlines: 18% less informative than their American cousins", 11/29/2013: I’m currently working on a project looking at the representation of constituency opinion in Parliament. One of our objectives involves examining the distribution of parliamentary attention — whether MPs from constituencies very concerned by immigration talk more about immigration than MPs from constituencies […]
On Headsup: The Blog, FEV (Fred Vultee) notes a remarkable confluence of nouns (and one adjective) on the front page of Sunday's New York Post:
A rare seven word BBC News headline noun pile sighting: "Emma West Croydon tram race rant woman sentenced", BBC News 7/1/2013: A woman who was filmed shouting racist abuse on a London tram in a video watched by 11 million people has been given a community sentence. Emma West, 36, of New Addington, admitted racially-aggravated […]
Noun pile? Crash Blossom? We report, you decide… Rollin Bishop, "Quest for Giant Bomb E3 Set Porn Bears Fruit", 6/24/2013: The Electronic Entertainment Expo — E3 for short — is held in Los Angeles every year, typically in June, and it means that a lot of journalists descend upon the area in short order. This […]
Last week, I came across what I thought was an artful headline in my local paper (Calgary Herald; 03/21/1012): Police looking into death by Balzac What reader wouldn't be lured into dipping further into this article, into wondering what human tragedy or comedy awaits in the finer print? Are we to be treated to the […]
Josh Fruhlinger sends along a sublime crash blossom from BBC News: "Dog helps lightning strike Redruth mayor." Requisite screenshot in case it changes:
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 few days ago, Fev at Headsup: The Blog posted about the "Hed noun pileup of the morning", namely "Texting death crash peer jailed". His link actually points to a BBC News story whose headline now reads "Peer jailed for motorway texting". All the same, Fev's larger point seems to be exactly right: "American hed […]