Language Log

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.)

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.