Well, two, anyway. From reader AH, who wrote "Even though I've been following the (deeply disturbing) story, it took me at least three tries before I parsed the headline correctly": Amount cheerleader who refused to cheer rapist required to pay reduced And from reader DM: Snakes in underwear smuggler fined $400
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," […]
Professor Simon Kirby (the world's only Professor of Language Evolution) regards himself as pretty good at parsing headlines on the whole, but saw one recently that completely stumped him. I agree with him; it's worse than a crash blossom, it's positively a train wreck, a scattered mess of uninterpretable short words almost all capable of […]
Arijit Guha sent along this remarkable crash blossom from the CNN website (spotted by his wife Heather): The lead paragraph explains: Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) — A Georgia man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease says he wants to die by having his organs harvested rather than wait for his degenerative nerve ailment to kill him.
While we're on the subject of grammatically ambiguous oil spill headlines, Larry Horn sends along a nice crash blossom (via the American Dialect Society mailing list). This morning's USA Today contains the headline: BP caps ruptured well, but more hurdles remain Larry writes: My first thought was that I had watched the news last night […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 – […]
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 […]
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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 […]
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