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.

Introducing the apostrophantom

In previous posts I have mentioned the apostrofly, described in the Guardian style book as “an insect that lands at random on the printed page, depositing an apostrophe wherever it lands”. It looks like this. What then do we make of an entity that absconds from the printed page, leaving only a ghostly trace of the apostrophe it once was?

Here is an image from Frank Miller’s exceptional Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (click to enlarge):

Close examination of the word its in the first thought bubble will show you what I mean: there is visible, if only just, a faint smudge in a space that formerly accommodated an errant apostrophe. Someone spotted this apostrophe and dealt with it, presumably with a ruthless efficiency of the sort Batman employs to put evildoers out of action.

That apostrophe, once spotted, never stood a chance, but in its wake there remains an indelible mark testifying to its former corporeality. It is no longer an apostrophe, but it is evidently not nothing; I call this mark the apostrophantom. This blend describes what it denotes, and also serves to honour the much-maligned genre (superhero comics) that inspired it.

Compared with the apostrofly, the apostrophantom is an elusive creature, a rare typographical spectre. Yet it exists. We have seen it with our own eyes. And now we have photographic evidence to persuade the sceptics.

By the way, if the internal monologue illustrated above disturbs you, you wouldn’t be the only one. But rest assured that the relationship between Batman and Robin (AKA Carrie) was chaste, and that the writer knew exactly what he was doing.

Up from out of in under for

The English language often combines verbs with prepositions to form phrasal verbs, and its subject-predicate structure means that many sentences end naturally in prepositions. Yet students, children, writers, and anyone likely to use the language are sometimes instructed not to end sentences with prepositions.

This is bad advice that has been passed on mindlessly for centuries, and seems to have led to embarrassing levels of contemporary silliness. It is an example of what Joseph M. Williams called “classroom folklore”, and good writers generally have the good sense to ignore it. This spurious pseudo-rule – a “cherished superstition” in H. W. Fowler’s words – seems to have originated with John Dryden, and has echoed through the dustier halls of grammar guidance ever since.

If anyone tells you that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition, you can safely assume they don’t know what they are talking about. Make good your escape while they insist that they do know “about what they talk” – unless you’re heavily outnumbered, in which case things could get ugly:

[Comic by the Perry Bible Fellowship.]

If there is gladness in the madness, it lies in the many witty and imaginative retorts and plays on natural English syntax. There are amusingly overworked sentences that end in long processions of stacked prepositions:

What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read to out of up for? (parsed here)

and even more tortuously elaborate variants:

What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read aloud to out of from up for?
What did you bring that book that I didn’t want to be read to out of about Down Under up for?

There are charming lines like the following one from James Thurber’s Alarms and Diversions:

‘It’s a bad city to get something in your eye in,’ the nurse said. ‘Yes,’ the interne agreed, ‘but there isn’t a better place to get something in your eye out in.’

and a more familiar one, often falsely attributed to Winston Churchill:

This is the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put.

Finally there is Morris Bishop’s witty poem ‘The Naughty Preposition’, which was published in The New Yorker on 27 September 1947:

I lately lost a preposition;
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, ‘Perdition!
Up from out of in under there.’

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, ‘What should he come
Up from out of in under for?’

Bishop was Professor of Romance Literature at Cornell University, where he was also University Historian. He had a reputation for wit and scholarship, and a flair for limericks and mystique. He seems to have been prejudiced against elves, but who can blame him? At least he was not prejudiced against stranded prepositions.

For more on ending sentences with prepositions, I recommend MWDEU’s historical analysis, sane commentary, and sound advice.

Visa check, Visa check, check-in man

Here is a notice at Ryanair’s check-in desk in Shannon Airport (click to enlarge (the image, not the airport)). Irish caricaturist Allan Cavanagh sent me this photo, and its contents immediately enchanted me – as all good chants do. It reads like a percussive jingle, which is a very unusual attribute in an airport sign.

Why is the line “Visa check” repeatedly repeated? Please don’t say it’s for emphasis; I couldn’t live with so dull a revelation, and would rather imagine that the word processor became self-aware and tried to revolt.

But is its chant of escape a chorus or a verse? What would come next, if the chant were extended? Would poetry suddenly emerge from the Langton’s-ant-esque loop of monotony? I would love to hear your ideas. Despite the banality of its subject matter and the maturity of its intended audience, “Visa check, Visa check…” may yet gain the popularity of classic chants like “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe”. Here at Sentence first, its rhythm suggested a riff on another well-known nursery rhyme:

Visa check, Visa check, check-in man,

Check my pass as fast as you can;

Cleave it, click it, and mark it with B,

Say a quick prayer for luggage and me.

The Cannibals of Galway

At the risk of sensationalising this blog beyond the bounds of credibility – if I ever had any in the first place – this sign was too good to miss. It’s behind a hot-food counter in a supermarket in Galway. Readers of a nervous disposition are advised to look away quickly, before their eyes are drawn to the blood-red sign now only centimetres away…

*

*

If you are deeply disturbed by the sinister implications, both corporate and gustatory, imagine my shock as I reeled out of the supermarket, my mind awhirl with the grisliest of possibilities, only to come upon this terrible scene at the docks, mere minutes away (click to enlarge):

*

*

If I had any doubt, after seeing the contents of the boat, that something gruesome and unspeakable was afoot, it was dispelled by those dark threatening clouds. Even as the sun sparkled on the water in the port, the ominous shapes overhead portended doom and dread. But what does it all mean? Where is Nancy Drew when you need her? And what’s that strange scratching noise coming from next door?

Moonwalking into the second dimension

Some elements of this sign show impressive attention to detail. Note for example the sharp heel, the deft facial profile, and the dynamic leading leg that evokes a pleasant but purposeful stroll by this pictogram-about-town. These careful features lead me to puzzle all the more about his crude claws and anatomically improbable following leg.

Best of all, though, is the incongruence of his choice of direction with respect to the giant authoritative arrow. Is he heedless or contrary, or is he some kind of subversive entity? Or do my eyes deceive me, and is he in fact breezily moonwalking his way away from the danger zone?

There are mysteries everywhere.

Attack of the 100 Foot Tissue

When I upload photos of signs and notices to Sentence first, I don’t mean to mock them but I can’t help having fun with them. A stroll down a supermarket aisle is enlivened by signs such as this one:

Apparently each hundred-foot mamsize tissue is sold singly, which seems about right, but whose mother did they measure? And despite the low cost, I think the market for this product is limited to a certain niche.

(SV is just an abbreviation of the name of the supermarket.)