The crash blossom of the day, at least here in the part of Scotland known as the Lothians, must surely be "Number of Lothian patients made ill by drinking rockets", in the Edinburgh Evening News today. Would you drink a rocket? I'm sure you would sensibly say it depends what the ingredients are. You wouldn't just […]
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Via Wonkette and The Raw Story comes this shocking political headline from the Reuters newswire: One can only imagine what Stephen Colbert will have to say about this.
Crash blossom of the week: Andrew Morse, "Google fans phone expectations by scheduling Android event", Total Telecom 1/4/2010.
Josh Fruhlinger sends along today's entry in the "crash blossom" sweepstakes, a headline from the BBC News website: SNP signals debate legal threat Crash blossoms (as we've discussed here and here) are infelicitously worded headlines that cause confusion due to a garden-path effect. Here we begin with SNP, which British readers at least will recognize […]
A crash blossom, you'll recall, is an infelicitously worded headline that leads the reader down the garden path. Here's a fine example from today's Associated Press headlines: (Hat tip: Stephen Anderson via Larry Horn.)
From John McIntyre: You've heard about the Cupertino. You have seen the eggcorn. You know about the snowclone. Now — flourish by trumpets and hautboys — we have the crash blossom. At Testy Copy Editors.com, a worthy colleague, Nessie3, posted this headline: Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms (If this seems a bit opaque, and […]
While traveling in the UK, Nancy Friedman spotted the tabloid headline "CROWN DIANA CRASH OUTRAGE" on the front page of The Sun. https://twitter.com/Fritinancy/status/1582008092136734722 "Crash blossoms," as we've often discussed here on Language Log, are headlines that are so ambiguously phrased that they suggest alternate (comical) readings. (The headline that gave "crash blossoms" their name appeared in […]
A recent Daily Beast spamletter featured an intriguing teaser: The headline made me think that a faction of the Duchess of Cornwall's staff, known as "Team Rubbish", had made a startling accusation. The next sentence (and the linked article) set me straight. So "Team Rubbish" is a classic Crash Blossom, caused as usual by noun/verb […]
Ruki Sayid & Ben Glaze, "Boris Johnson returns from Saudi Arabia empty handed after flop oil beg trip", The Mirror 3/17/2022: Boris Johnson is landing back in Britain empty-handed this morning after his oil begging trip to the Gulf flopped – and Vladimir Putin lashed out at the West. Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine has […]
The current xkcd: The mouseover title: "Roundly-condemned headlinese initiative shuttered indefinitely."
This one depends on word-sense ambiguity rather than on the structural and part-of-speech issues in the ambiguous headlines we've called crash blossoms. "After 9 months, women’s body to get new head", Times of India 8/26/2020: Nine months after being headless and non-functional, the Goa State Commission for Women is set to get a new chairperson. […]
Chris Waigl is a longtime friend of Language Log — among her many accomplishments is the creation of the Eggcorn Database in 2005 (with contributions from Arnold Zwicky and me). These days she conducts post-doctoral research in the Boreal Fires team of the Alaska EPSCoR Fire and Ice project at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, […]