A violent ambiguity

In a local newspaper yesterday I saw what appeared at first to be an alarming story. After a moment’s stunned disbelief – this was before my morning tea – the subhead provided an innocent explanation: Ireland’s flagship children’s festival, Baboró, is celebrating its thirteenth year.

Owing to time constraints I will not address the typographic shortcomings in the digital version of this article, except to mention in passing that – in the reproduced subhead – the words children’s and festival are unnecessarily capitalised, the accent (síneadh fada) in Baboró is missing, and there is a good case for inserting a comma immediately after it.

What struck me, if you’ll pardon the pun, is the queasy ambiguity of the headline. In a newspaper context it is, of course, understandable: headlinese is a language unto itself, one that prizes punchy monosyllabicity above all. Agreements become pacts, disagreements become clashes; increases become hikes; decreases become cuts; an investigation is a probe; to punish is to rap; to support is to back; to criticise is to blast or slam; and everywhere are bans, rows, bids, leaks, shifts, shocks, pleas, moves, calls, vows and threats of all sorts. Whatever you are doing, you can be said to act. And so on.

But this tendency to use the shortest and sharpest possible word sometimes comes at the cost of intelligibility, and sometimes at the cost of good judgement. The word Baboró might not mean much to some readers, especially if you are not Irish or based in Ireland, but to me it connotes “children’s arts festival” and immediately conjures up images of the kind of child- and family-oriented cultural events for which the festival is renowned.

This information underlines the unfortunate ambiguity of the headline. Maybe recent events have sensitised me to certain interpretations of the juxtaposed words “hit” and “teens”, but when my eyes scanned the page, my first (pre-caffeine) reaction was not to assume that something or someone had reached its thirteenth year.

To conclude: full credit to the newspaper for spreading the word about the festival, and continued good wishes to everyone involved in Baboró, but please, to whom it concerns: try to parse your headlines with fresh eyes before committing them to print, if only for the sake of your more literal-minded readers.

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.

Five-typo feast of fail

Everyone makes typos now and then. I’m not in the habit of pointing them out unless they’re especially egregious or interesting.

This impressive collection – five (5) in one sentence – belongs to the former category, and may even constitute some kind of record. Click the image to enlarge:

The typo count is six if you include the capital letter in “Psychologist”. I didn’t include it because it’s an editing call rather than a typo.

From today’s Galway Advertiser, page 67. A digital edition is available on the website.

“Attacks” on the language are greatly misunderstood

Last Thursday’s edition of the Irish Times included an opinion piece about the English Language. When I saw the title (“Attacks on the language are rising, basically”) I wondered what the author, David Adams, might be referring to. Was his article a damning assessment of funding for education? A protest at misplaced apostrophes, those errant marks whose ubiquity some would have you believe portends an imminent apostrophopocalypse? A penetrating analysis of contemporary Newspeak, Doublethink, and political framing, such as the redefinition of “war”?

No: Mr Adams spends almost half the article complaining about people using the word “basically” too much, while the rest is a scattershot rant about the nouning of verbs, Australian intonation, and assorted fads and verbal ticks that annoy him. He makes a reasonable point or two near the end, but along the way he takes tiresome potshots at the “blogosphere” (his scare quotes) in “cyberspace” (mine), where “words are regularly invented, mangled or forced against their will from nouns into verbs, or vice versa” (about which more below). He concludes by having another go at “basically”. His barely suppressed rage at the utterance of this word is more than a little alarming:

Only good manners and not wanting to be thought a complete lunatic stop some of us from screaming: “There is no ‘basically’ about it. . . .”

Unwilling to suppress my own more temperate feelings about the matter, I emailed a response to the Irish Times, reprinted below. My letter (which is rather long, but a lot shorter than it was originally) does not appear in today’s Times, though there is one short letter congratulating Mr Adams “for highlighting the abuse of ‘basically’”. At this point I would like to refer all interested parties to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage,* whose entry on “basically” includes the level-headed point that “the rigorous pursuit of excising ‘basically’ does not look like an important path to better prose”.

* Freely available in the dreaded “cyberspace” or from any good bookshop.

Misinformation in the Sunday Times

In the Sunday Times Culture magazine of 14 June 2009, there is an article entitled “Life, the Universe and Ulysses”. It begins as follows:

The year1859 was a good year for books that changed the world. Darwin published On the Origin of Species, starting the debate on evolution, and John Stuart Mill published On Liberty, his influential essay on liberalism.

I have a few points to make about this seemingly innocuous sentence. Mostly I wish to draw attention to an error both subtler and more serious than the typo that clumped year and 1859 together: the debate on evolution did not begin with On the Origin of Species. This is not even a gross simplification; it is uninformed and misleading nonsense. Darwin’s book is a milestone in evolutionary theory, but the debate on evolution had been going on – sometimes sporadically, sometimes vigorously – for decades, centuries, even millennia, before it. Take for example Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique. Lamarck’s ideas have fallen in and out of favour over the years; nonetheless, his book was a scientific treatise on evolution that predated Darwin’s by half a century.

There are many other characters renowned in the pre-Darwinian debate on evolution, each of whom made valuable contributions of varying scientific and philosophical validity. They include Linnaeus, Paley, St. Augustine, Mendel, Lucretius, Al-Jahiz, Bruno, Schelling, Leibniz, Robert Chambers, Buffon, Von Baer, Cuvier, Goethe, Malthus, Lyell, Kant, Herder, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin. I could trace the debate on evolution back to Aristotle – or even further, to Plato, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Anaximander and Thales – but I don’t want to waste my readers’ time. You can confirm what I say, take it on faith, or look it up.

Nor will I not criticise the “changed the world” cliché beyond pointing out (pedantically) that all books change the world, some more than others. Everything changes the world, including the fallacious line I quoted at the top of this post. It is reasonable to assume that some people saw it in the Sunday Times and accepted it as true. It isn’t. No doubt a background in biology has sensitised me to this kind of misinformation, but the information I have cited above is available to anyone with a few minutes to spare and access to a library or the internet, which is the least one might expect of broadsheet journalism. A moment’s reflection, or a few moments’ research, is all that is needed to avoid such mistakes.

Edit: I thought I might be accused of overreacting! Maybe I did, or maybe it was a displaced rant. The public field of evolutionary theory is beset by creationist rubbish, while neo-Darwinism has talked itself into a corner. By obscuring much historical context, the Sunday Times’ lapse does not help matters, but it’s minor by comparison.

Peddling while pedalling

When you’re cycling in a city you should expect the unexpected – especially if you’re sharing the road with a lorry in a hurry. Luckily no one seems to have been seriously hurt in this incident, but it must have been a shocking experience for everyone there. One of the cyclists has uploaded a couple of photos, and the story was picked up by the Guardian and NY Times websites, among others.

[Edit: this image is just an image, not a video or an external link.]

The Guardian reported that the Mayor of London and the UK transport minister “peddled” round a corner. They may have been pedalling, but I don’t think they were peddling anything. The two activities do not go well together: presumably even cyclists who peddle from the saddle would not attempt to do so without stopping.

The newspaper’s own style guide has the following entries for these near-homonyms:

pedaller: cyclist
peddler: drug dealer
pedlar: hawker

Peddler can mean more than “drug dealer”: one can peddle goods of all kinds, though the word sometimes carries connotations of dubious or illicit activity. But the guide is deliberately very concise; I am not disputing its entries, I am reproving the website editing. Whether the mistake was the writer’s or an editor’s, it was a careless one – though not as careless (or dangerous) as the lorry driver’s.

The atomic theory of sub-headings

Sensitive readers may prefer to skip this post.

A disturbing article in the Sunday Times of 26 April 2009 has the following heading and sub-heading:

There is no easy way to describe what happens to human bodies destroyed with bombs. The very idea is sickening and grotesque, yet it happens, and it requires description. The article calls it pulverisation, which has a similar meaning to atomisation but can also commonly mean grinding or pounding, as in food preparation when one pulverises grains, herbs, or meat. These additional connotations could mislead a reader upon first glance, and pulverisation is quite a technical word, hence the scare quotes in the heading and the elegant variation of “blow captives to atoms” in the sub-heading.

There are several phrases with the form blow [object] to . . . . You could describe something being blown to pieces, to bits, or to smithereens, and raise neither eyebrows nor – if the object is inanimate – objections. Blow . . . to pieces and blow . . . to bits may be too grisly for a broadsheet newspaper to use in the context of human violence. Blow . . . to smithereens is too slangy for formal use; it is used in a quote further on in the Times article, and is the kind of vernacular phrase found in boys adventure comics. Blow . . . to kingdom come (i.e. “to heaven”, “to the next world”) is too idiomatic.

Though there is evident difficulty in deciding which words are most appropriate for formal use, blow . . . to atoms still seems an odd choice to me, and not just because I have a scientific background. It may have been selected by elimination, as a relatively neutral and quasi-scientific term. Reducing the phrase to destroy would sidestep many of the problems listed, but perhaps destroy was not specific or sensational enough. Pulverise is equally direct but has the problems mentioned above. Is there an accurate and tactful alternative? It’s a tricky one.