Language Log

Crash blossom of the day:

We post a lot of crash blossoms here on Language Log — appallingly worded headlines that slow down your parsing and (whether intendedly or not) have crazy extra meanings. But let's hand out some kudos occasionally for totally wonderful headlines: clever, appropriate, amusing, terse, eye-catching, and appropriate. There was one in The Scotsman today. Here […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

In his latest On Language column, Ben Zimmer examines "Crash Blossoms", and introduces the topic with a literary allusion: Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote […]

Mark Leibovich and Grant Barrett have done another end-of-the-year buzzword catalog for the NYT Week in Review. There's a sampling on the front page: aporkalypse, Chimerica, octomom, car tone, ununbium. And then Grant's main list, from athey to wise Latina woman, on p. 3.

From François Lang: This headline (WP [11/1/24]) completely garden-pathed me–especially because of "watch strikes"! I've rarely encountered a garden-path sentence in the wild, i.e., not in the context of a linguistic discussion of garden-path sentences. "On Baalbek’s edges, the displaced watch strikes rain down on their city"

Jose Pagliery and Frank Pallotta, "Hacked news companies tweet Chinese fired on U.S. warship", CNN 1/16/2015: [h/t Dmitri Ostrovsky]

From the Hackney Gazette:

Well, almost: Mark Kinver, "Citizen science charts horse chestnut tree pest spread", BBC News 1/24/2014. Though charts might have been a plural noun, it's clearly a verb in this case, alas. The headline writer missed the chance for a genuine 8-element noun pile, e.g. "Citizen science horse chestnut tree pest spread tally". Still, British headline interpretation […]

The crash-blossom-y headline that Geoff Pullum just posted about, "Google's Computer Might Betters Translation Tool," has been changed in the online edition of The New York Times to something more sensible: "Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool." The headline in the print edition, says LexisNexis, is "Google Can Now Say No to 'Raw Fish Shoes,' […]