BBC crash blossom: Girl murders car?

It’s a while since Sentence first featured a crash blossom – those headlines that lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking – so here’s one from the front page of today’s BBC news website: Girl found alive in France murders car.

Revenge for ‘The Cars That Ate Paris’, perhaps?

[Full story here. It's not pleasant.]

The ambiguity hinges on the phrase murders car, which suggests a surreal and impossible crime (a girl murders a car) but really constitutes part of an unusual compound noun, France murders car: a car implicated in murders in France. In which a girl was found alive.

France murders car also qualifies as a distant compound, like blast boy, canoe wife and pumpkin bus – multiple-noun compounds intelligible only to readers familiar with the relationship between the nouns, or who can guess at the story behind them.

The BBC report itself contains another syntactic ambiguity:

The girl found away from the car – thought to be seven or eight years old – was shot three times and seriously injured, and the younger daughter – only four – hid beneath her mother and was not even found until midnight, our correspondent says.

Though it quickly becomes clear from the context that seven or eight years old refers to a girl and not the car, this could have been signalled more clearly – by inserting she is inside the first pair of dashes, for example.

Nor is this the first time a headline has conferred life on a transportation vehicle: a couple of years ago I wrote about the strange implications of “Sound Transit train hits teenage girl, survives”.

[Hat-tip to @mrdarnley.]

Update:

Fev at headsup suggests a simple change that would avoid the crash blossom: “Girl found alive in France murder car”.

A grisly crash blossom

What would you do to escape prosecution?

Crash blossoms, as you may know, are headlines that can lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking.

Today’s Irish Times has a mild one. The word to, commonly used in headlines to indicate futurity (as in the example above), here inadvertently generates an alternative meaning in which the Dutch TV presenters ate human flesh in order to escape prosecution.

It’s a wild idea.

The headline is unlikely to be misunderstood, but it has the potential to cause a momentary miscue — replacing to with will would avoid it — and it is grammatically interesting.

There are more crash blossoms here, at Language Log (including the recent gem “Does Donald Trump support matter?”), and on the Crash Blossoms blog.

The sex scientific research show

Roll up, roll up! Please form an orderly queue for the all-new, all-outrageous Sex Scientific Research Show! According to the Australian Daily Telegraph, fat men enjoy this carnival of degenerate academia when it lasts longer:

Where to begin with such a headline? For starters, it’s cynical, sloppy, and daft. It’s a barely significant generalisation dressed up as a salient fact. Ambiguity compounds its wrongness: it’s supposed to mean that (some) fat men have longer lasting sex, but the Telegraph‘s use of enjoy suggests that they might not enjoy it if it didn’t last as long.

And have or enjoy what? This too is open to misinterpretation. Summarising the research in lucid headlinese requires rearranging the above (e.g., “Scientific research shows…”) or placing a comma after sex and an s at the end of show. Without them the headline is made sillier still, because it changes the object from longer lasting sex to longer lasting sex scientific research show.

The last three words are probably intended to stress the article’s pseudo-respectability. There are fewer pretensions at the Weekly World News, which offers the snappier but equally inane “Study: Fat Men Better In Bed”. Granted, the apparent source of this ‘news’ has a much duller title and conclusion, and it appears in a journal few men would read in public, but at least it doesn’t insult our intelligence and our grasp of elementary syntax..

[more crash blossoms]

Weapon of choice

NBC Miami published a dramatic story last week about a “botched robbery attempt”. As you can see, the robbery isn’t the only thing that was botched:

The story attracted nine comments, all of them about the strange headline (which is of a type known as a crash blossom). For example:

I must know, where did that robber find a kitchen knife gun?!

Was Groucho Marx involved in the creation of this headline?

I had to join up just to comment on the headline. […] Please tell me where I can find one of these weapons! Where is your editor?

The headline was soon fixed:

Judging by the figures in the right-hand column, this made the locals more amused, bored, and sad; and less furious, thrilled, and intrigued. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

[more crash blossoms here, there, and elsewhere]

Loco motive

“Sound Transit train hits teenage girl, survives” was the headline to an Associated Press story that did the rounds recently. You might well wonder at it. Trains, after all, are not usually considered to be in any danger after they hit teenage girls. It is the person who was hit that we worry about.

Many websites and news agencies, including MSNBC‘s newsvine.com (“Get Smarter Here”) and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Seattle Times, reprinted the headline without seeming to notice the bizarre parallel world it conjured up.

How did so many people read, edit and arrange this and fail to notice its absurdity? A few outlets, to their credit, changed the headline (“Girl hit by Sound Transit train, survives”; “Teenage girl survives being hit by Sound Transit train”; “King County: Teen girl survives after being hit by Sound Transit train”):

KXLY.com added the relative pronoun who. This was a simple and effective strategy but it made the headlinese seem uncharacteristically like coherent prose:

Browsing the news websites that reported the event, I saw all sorts of variations on the theme, but a remarkable number retained the silly original. Accidental anthropomorphism for the win!

Language Log, meanwhile, has been hosting an interesting discussion on precisely what constitutes a crash blossom, and I’ve written about a few more of them here.

[Hat tip to Michael Quinion.]

Knocking the legend of the knocking leg end

The dubious award for crash blossom of the week (last week) goes to this disembodied doozy from the Dayton Daily News: “Man shot in chest, leg knocks on door for help”.

Without wishing to make light of the man’s plight, I suppose that when you’re out on a limb without a leg to stand on, you (k)need all the help you can get. But you won’t get it from those perennially troublesome headline commas.

Note the URL‘s unambiguous “and” (…chest_and_leg_knoc.html), which was probably in the original line but got replaced in the conversion to headlinese — with ridiculous results.

Thanks to John E. McIntyre for bringing the story to my attention.

Crash blossoms up the garden path

Last month a story appeared on the Japan Today website with the headline: “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms”:

Since the word order effortlessly leads readers up the garden path, it is not immediately apparent that the main thrust of the headline is that a violinist blossoms, or perhaps that a violinist’s career blossoms. This violinist is “linked to JAL crash” by personal tragedy: her father died in a Japan Airlines (JAL) crash. The phrase “linked to JAL crash” is an adjectival clause with an elliptical “who is”:

[The] violinist [who is] linked to [the] JAL crash blossoms

The story has since disappeared but the headline remains. When it first appeared it was picked up by users of the Testy Copy Editors forum, who quickly adopted “crash blossoms” as a new generic term for headlines that miscue readers. Although the name is new, the phenomenon has long been characteristic of headlines, as John E. McIntyre has pointed out.

New examples emerge constantly. Yesterday, Language Log brought my attention to a glorious new crash blossom in an Associated Press headline: “McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers”. My immediate reaction was to burst out laughing. The images evoked were as silly as they were sacrilegious – or as Homer Simpson might put it, sacrilicious. Mmm… deep-fried holy grail… Then I was baffled by how such an obviously ambiguous line could have slipped by an editor (or a series of them).

To see just how easily the headline might have been steered into good sense, I recommend Literal-Minded’s analysis of the ambiguity (and his literal-minded image of the grail-frying). Happily, I have yet to be inured to such transgressions. Crash blossoms retain the endless potential to surprise and delight. They are the journalistic jokes that keep giving, and the AP’s bizarre arrangement of McDonald’s, the holy grail and potato farmers was a humdinger lacking only a punchline.

The original headline has since been changed to “Potato farmer holy grail: McDonald’s french fries”, but there was no need to re-order the sentence: a colon after fries would have sufficed to eliminate the ambiguity, if not the outlandish abstraction:

McDonald’s fries: the holy grail for potato farmers

This simple insertion would be all the more appropriate today, since it is National Punctuation Day in America. Changing the headline leaves far less room for amusement, of course, but luckily the original phrasing has been repeated on many other news websites.

The grotesque aesthetic has long been evident in art, and the term “crash blossoms” appeals to me because it poetically captures the simultaneous horror and beauty of mangled syntax. This poetic aspect is reflected in the title of Chris Waigl’s blog post about it. For further fun with foul phrasing, headsup: the blog routinely analyses headline language, and there are more crash blossoms mentioned and dissected at Language Log. I have also written about a couple of them here on Sentence first, and am delighted to finally know what to call them. It can only increase my contrary appreciation of them.

* * * * *

Update: The term “crash blossom” continues to spread. Since writing this post I have seen several high-profile articles discussing the phenomenon and its new name, including pieces in GOOD magazine and on the NPR and NYT websites. There is also an eponymous blog dedicated to collecting crash blossoms, but it isn’t being updated very often, at least at the time of writing.