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.

Subjected to unreasonable laughter

From the Sligo Times, date unknown:

In many parts of Co. Sligo hares are now practically unknown because of the unreasonable laughter to which they have been subjected in recent years.

The Sligo Times was published from 1909–1914. I haven’t seen this superb typo in its original context, but I’d like to think it’s genuine. It appears in A Steroid Hit the Earth, an amusing misprint-o-rama by Martin Toseland.

Who’d have guessed hares were so sensitive to mockery?

The ongoing fuss over ‘ongoing’

“avoid this ugly adjective” – The Times Style Guide

A journalist friend on Twitter, Oliver, asked my opinion of ongoing. He said he had been asked to ban it in a style guide, and that he didn’t see why. I said I had nothing against it, and that banning it struck me as excessive and unhelpful. Although I sometimes find constructions like ongoing situation and ongoing issue vague or euphemistic, I see no point in prohibiting them outright.

Indeed, there are times when the adjective lends a helpful distinction. Take ongoing treatment in the context of medical care: it immediately conveys the prolonged or recurring nature of the care, as distinct from one-off treatment. You could say continuing treatment instead, but why be obliged to avoid a particular modifier if there’s nothing inherently wrong with it (which there isn’t)?

I think there are many occasions when ongoing can profitably be deleted, or perhaps replaced with current, continual, continuing, developing, prolonged, persistent, sustained, in progress, under way, or some such phrase – if only for variation. It is something of a journalistic crutch word, as Oliver described it. But this is no reason to remove it from the realm of possibility.

A day after this discussion, the Guardian style guide tweeted:

Can we agree to delete the word ‘ongoing’ whenever & wherever we see it? The writing will be improved & the world will be a happier place.

A bit harsh, I thought, and checked the Guardian website to see if the word appeared there often. It did: 20,765 times (more by the time you click). Including many headlines. I let @guardianstyle know about this, and they found it “shameful”.

Their response was partly tongue-in-cheek, but there’s really no shame in ongoing. A similar search on the Irish Times website yielded 22,187 hits. Even allowing for repeats, these figures strongly indicate that the word is not only well established but also useful. Browsing examples in newspapers and corpora, the usages seem to me to vary from perfectly reasonable to utterly (but harmlessly) superfluous.

A Google Ngram charts ongoing’s recent rise to prominence. The trend happened slightly earlier in the U.S. than in the UK (about which see the final quote below). Ernest Gowers, a close observer of the language, called it a vogue word back in the 1950s, and people have been griping about it ever since. Here are a few examples.

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]

That misleading ‘that’

A story in yesterday’s Observer had a sentence that shows the importance of care in using the word that:

Assange insisted there was no evidence that anyone had been put at risk and that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back and taken great care not to put people at risk.

Because that follows no evidence but not insisted, the later thats — before WikiLeaks and implied in “and [that WikiLeaks had] taken great care” — can serve false interpretations. Taken at face value, the line could be telling us that Assange insisted the following:

(1) there was no evidence that anyone had been put at risk;
(2) there was no evidence that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back; and
(3) there was no evidence that WikiLeaks had taken great care not to put people at risk.

Yet only the first of these was intended; the others are contrary to Assange’s claims. Most readers will intuit from context the obvious meaning, but some may be misled. I don’t know how easily — for native readers, perhaps only by deliberate misreading. The and after risk is, crucially, not or. For comparison, though, see how the line reads with an extra that in the opening clause:

Assange insisted [that] there was no evidence that anyone had been put at risk and that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back and taken great care not to put people at risk.

without either that:

Assange insisted there was no evidence anyone had been put at risk and that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back and taken great care not to put people at risk.

and with the other that instead (and a clarifying comma):

Assange insisted that there was no evidence anyone had been put at risk, and that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back and had taken great care not to put people at risk.

Given the options, and the story’s sensitivity, the potential for ambiguity ought to have been noticed and eliminated. It wouldn’t have been difficult. The third alternative above, for example, would have been clearer. Better and simpler again, the sentence could have been divided in two:

Assange insisted there was no evidence that anyone had been put at risk. He said that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back and had taken great care not to put people at risk.

There’s a lot of leeway in which thats should be retained and which can be omitted. This leeway has its limits, though, as the Observer’s line and two previous posts demonstrate.

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Note: This article also appears on the Visual Thesaurus.

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.]