Language Log

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.

Today's crash blossom likely involves multiple aborted landings: Romney wins mask lingering questions about his candidacy Since the word wins occurs much more often as a verb than as a noun, you have a good excuse if you needed to take several runs at this one. Just what exactly did Romney win? A rubber Ronald Reagan […]

Crash blossom of the week: "Don't help old, blind council tells parking officers", The Age 2/1/2012.

Aspects of the Finnish language happen to have come up a couple of times in recent weeks on Language Log ("Rare Finnish Crash Blossom", 1/13/2012; "It's baaack . . . and upside-down!", 1/2/2012). Lauri Karttunen, from whom I learned a bit about Finnish when I was a grad student, sent in these comments: I did […]

From reader Paul Sleigh, the crash blossom of the week: "Mansell guilty of missing businessman's murder", ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News, 11/7/2011. Paul offers a lesson in Australian manners: Obviously, if you tell someone you're going to be attending a businessman's murder, you damn well better be there on time! None of this "I missed […]

Whitney Calk submitted a request to the state of Tennessee for the following license plate: According to Nick Carbone, "Tennessee Veggie Lover's Vanity License Plate Banned for 'Vulgarity'", Time 9/16/2011: A Tennessee woman just wanted to share her love of vegetarian eating. The state thought she was expressing her love for a more explicit activity. […]

Several readers have sent me links to a recent headline: Anthony Shadid, "Qaddafi Forces Bear Down on Strategic Town as Rebels Flee", NYT 3/10/2011.

With this post I reach my thousandth Language Log contribution. I wrote 676 posts for the old series, before the original server died in agony in April 2008. Those were written from Santa Cruz, California (between 2003 and 2005 and in 2006-2007), from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard (2005-2006), and from Edinburgh, Scotland (2007-2008) The […]

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:Skeletons halt work on clinic

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 Pullum was rightly baffled by Simon Heffer's recent pronouncement that sentences like The Prime Minister has warned that spending cuts are necessary are ungrammatical, since the verb warn, Heffer imagines, must always be transitive. But the objection doesn't come completely out of nowhere. As commenter iching noted, there's an entry on warn in Merriam-Webster's […]

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 […]

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.)