Headlines that have a second, unintended meaning

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From The Metro

This suspended railway is the coolest looking train system ever

Try telling the people of Seaford, who's service has been suspended for several months.

[stuving]

London open: Iron supplements move towards two-month high

That's the headline of a financial new item. Now how many of you were thinking of those orange pills you buy in Boots? Not obvious that the "complements" is a verb, is it?

[Bmblbzzz]

These are known as crash blossoms.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1693

Crash blossoms
August 26, 2009 @ 9:59 pm · Filed by Ben Zimmer under ambiguity, Crash blossoms, Language and the media

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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 it should, the story is about a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.)

A quick response by subtle_body suggested that crash blossom would be an excellent name for headlines done in by some such ambiguity — a word understood in a meaning other than the intended one. The elliptical name of headline writing makes such ambiguities an inevitable hazard.

And danbloom was quick to set up a blog to collect examples of "infelicitously worded headlines."

Chris Waigl, reporting on the same neologism, describes "crash blossoms" as "those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking." Indeed, when such infelicitous headlines have come up here on Language Log, they have typically been discussed as examples of "garden path sentences." After the break, a recent headline of the classic "garden path" variety.


On Sunday night, this headline appeared on the CNN Wire before events took a more tragic turn:

3 missing after waves hit Maine located

The lede graf of the story explained:

Three people missing Sunday after large ocean waves knocked several people into the Atlantic off Maine's Acadia National Park have been located, a park official said.

(The headline and lede graf were quickly replaced after news emerged that one of the three people, a 7-year-old girl, had died.)

As John McIntyre points out, headlines are particularly susceptible to improper "garden path" parsing, since the elliptical nature of headlinese can lead to various syntactic ambiguities. In this example, we're so used to copula deletion in headlines that "3 missing…" is easily parsed as "3 are missing…" But by the time we get to "located" at the end of the headline, we discover that this is a misparsing. Following the structure of the lede, the headline is intended to be read as "3 [people] missing after waves hit Maine [have been] located." I'd be impressed if anyone got that reading the first time through.

For more garden path headlines, see:

"Garden paths at the Guardian" (9/21/2004)
"Surprising crocodile kin" (1/26/2006)
"Linguist thought able to read isn't" (7/16/2006)
August 26, 2009 @ 9:59 pm · Filed by Ben Zimmer under ambiguity, Crash blossoms, Language and the media

[stuving]

I can't help thinking this must have an old name or names, given it's nothing new. For example, from the Observer in 1993(!); what did the subs who wrote this (or the ones that didn't) call it?:

"MoD bribes firms still supplying armed forces"

That was the first one that really stood out as needing three reads to make sense of (and so is still in the "odd cuttings" file). But most of the examples I see, while unclear or ambiguous or just plain clumsy, do not seem to me to be easier to read wrong than right.

What about this, which isn't a headline - reporting a talk by a researcher:

"Less than one percent of chemotherapy drugs actually make it to the tumour site - the rest are absorbed by healthy tissue all over the body, causing the horrific side-effects we associate with cancer patients."

Did she really mean that - why are we using them?