Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Salmoneus · Post by **Salmoneus** » Thu Feb 12, 2015 9:25 pm

Rolling football news

Salmoneus · Post by **Salmoneus** » Sun Feb 15, 2015 7:52 pm

Oh, I love this one:

Wanted Caerphilly Facebook police taunt man arrested

Civil War Bugle · Post by **Civil War Bugle** » Mon Feb 16, 2015 10:45 pm

Woman stung by scorpion found on plane

Not a major one but I did pause to think about finding women on planes.

din · Post by **din** » Tue Feb 17, 2015 2:47 pm

Salmoneus wrote:Oh, I love this one:

Wanted Caerphilly Facebook police taunt man arrested

Is the guy an individual from Caerphilly who taunts police over Facebook? Making him a 'Facebook police-taunt-man'? Otherwise I don't get it.

hwhatting · Post by **hwhatting** » Wed Feb 18, 2015 12:10 am

din wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:Wanted Caerphilly Facebook police taunt man arrested
Is the guy an individual from Caerphilly who taunts police over Facebook? Making him a 'Facebook police-taunt-man'? Otherwise I don't get it.

That seems to be the intended meaning, yes.

jal · Post by **jal** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 10:19 am

An oldie (2010) I just stumbled upon today: ‘Grim Sleeper’ Arrest Fans Debate on DNA Use. It took me some time to realise it wasn't fans of the Sleeper's arrest debating DNA use...

JAL

linguoboy · Post by **linguoboy** » Fri Apr 24, 2015 10:36 am

NYT Can't Math: "A number of residents speculated that the town’s employees left out of loyalty to Mr. Ramsey, who lost by 122 votes to 84."

Salmoneus · Post by **Salmoneus** » Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:23 pm

linguoboy wrote:NYT Can't Math: "A number of residents speculated that the town’s employees left out of loyalty to Mr. Ramsey, who lost by 122 votes to 84."

I don't get it.

I also originally didn't get this BBC headline:
Victim's video helps jail rapist
It makes perfect sense if you look at it right, but, perhaps because of newspaperese's obsession with nouns, I got it all wrong.
[The article itself has "victim's video helps convict rapist", which I found more straightforward, but theoretically is equally ambiguous]

Matrix · Post by **Matrix** » Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:41 pm

Salmoneus wrote:
linguoboy wrote:NYT Can't Math: "A number of residents speculated that the town’s employees left out of loyalty to Mr. Ramsey, who lost by 122 votes to 84."
I don't get it.

If the other person got 84 votes, you can't have lost to them by 122 votes, unless you somehow got negative votes.

Kereb · Post by **Kereb** » Thu Apr 30, 2015 6:48 pm

Matrix wrote:If the other person got 84 votes, you can't have lost to them by 122 votes, unless you somehow got negative votes.

not necessarily; there exists a convention in sports* to put the winning score first, so that it makes equal sense to say you "won 5 to 3" and "lost 5 to 3". the sentence reads just fine when talking about an election, too.

*some sports at least, don't 'correct' me with something about fuckin cricket or whatever or some basic ∃=∀ fail

Matrix · Post by **Matrix** » Thu Apr 30, 2015 7:03 pm

Kereb wrote:not necessarily; there exists a convention in sports* to put the winning score first, so that it makes equal sense to say you "won 5 to 3" and "lost 5 to 3". the sentence reads just fine when talking about an election, too.

The problem is the word 'by'. Mr. Ramsey didn't lose 122 to 84, according to the article - he lost by 122 to 84. That means that he got 122 votes less than 84.

Salmoneus · Post by **Salmoneus** » Fri May 01, 2015 8:02 am

Matrix wrote:
Kereb wrote:not necessarily; there exists a convention in sports* to put the winning score first, so that it makes equal sense to say you "won 5 to 3" and "lost 5 to 3". the sentence reads just fine when talking about an election, too.
The problem is the word 'by'. Mr. Ramsey didn't lose 122 to 84, according to the article - he lost by 122 to 84. That means that he got 122 votes less than 84.

Huh? No, "122 to 84" is what he lost by. That was the score he lost by. Your reading wouldn't make sense at all, regardless of the numbers. You can say "lost by five votes", but "lost by five votes to twelve" means you got 5 and they got 12, not that they got twelve and you got seven!

Kereb · Post by **Kereb** » Fri May 01, 2015 12:59 pm

Salmoneus wrote:
Matrix wrote: The problem is the word 'by'. Mr. Ramsey didn't lose 122 to 84, according to the article - he lost by 122 to 84. That means that he got 122 votes less than 84.
Huh? No, "122 to 84" is what he lost by. That was the score he lost by. Your reading wouldn't make sense at all, regardless of the numbers. You can say "lost by five votes", but "lost by five votes to twelve" means you got 5 and they got 12, not that they got twelve and you got seven!

^^^ this.

when giving scores like this, "122 to 84" / "5 to 3" / "12 to 5" makes kind of a phrase unit that may or may not take "by" but means the same thing.

pharazon · Post by **pharazon** » Fri May 01, 2015 2:58 pm

Kereb wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:
Matrix wrote: The problem is the word 'by'. Mr. Ramsey didn't lose 122 to 84, according to the article - he lost by 122 to 84. That means that he got 122 votes less than 84.
Huh? No, "122 to 84" is what he lost by. That was the score he lost by. Your reading wouldn't make sense at all, regardless of the numbers. You can say "lost by five votes", but "lost by five votes to twelve" means you got 5 and they got 12, not that they got twelve and you got seven!
^^^ this.

when giving scores like this, "122 to 84" / "5 to 3" / "12 to 5" makes kind of a phrase unit that may or may not take "by" but means the same thing.

I agree that Salmoneus' reading must be the one intended, but maybe there's a dialect issue that's causing confusion here. I would say "lost by a score of 5 to 2" or "lost 5 to 2" or "lost by 3 points/runs/goals/etc.", but never "lost by 5 to 2".

Viktor77 · Post by **Viktor77** » Fri May 01, 2015 4:37 pm

New Federal Rules Aim to Stop Fiery Oil Train Crashes from NBC

It's good to have rules stopping fiery oil train crashes. Fiery oil train crashes are bad.

Not garden path, but the author might have mistaken NBC's audience with her young children, which is a perfectly reasonable mistake to make.

Kereb · Post by **Kereb** » Sat May 02, 2015 7:06 pm

Viktor77 wrote:Not garden path, but the author might have mistaken NBC's audience with her young children, which is a perfectly reasonable mistake to make.

what
is there a more 'adult' way you would have phrased this?

Viktor77 · Post by **Viktor77** » Sat May 02, 2015 10:16 pm

Kereb wrote:
Viktor77 wrote:Not garden path, but the author might have mistaken NBC's audience with her young children, which is a perfectly reasonable mistake to make.
what
is there a more 'adult' way you would have phrased this?

New rules aim to prevent dangerous/disastrous oil train derailments/disasters. Basically anything that is not fiery. Fiery is not a very sophisticated word. Not only does it sound like something you'd say to a child, it sounds a tad sensationalist, a tad obvious, and a tad too colorful. Also stop is a bit weird, a word like prevent would sound a bit more elevated. So yes, this title can be improved.

Kereb · Post by **Kereb** » Sun May 03, 2015 9:58 pm

headline language tends toward the terse, you can't be unaware of this. your revision would appear to a newspaper editor to gain nothing but additional characters.

jal · Post by **jal** » Mon May 04, 2015 5:02 am

Kereb wrote:headline language tends toward the terse, you can't be unaware of this. your revision would appear to a newspaper editor to gain nothing but additional characters.

If terseness is what you want, "aim" could've been scrapped from that head line without any loss of clearness. And, while we're at it, replace "fiery crashes" with "infernoes" :).

JAL

Salmoneus · Post by **Salmoneus** » Mon May 04, 2015 8:20 am

Broadsheet: New rules to prevent rail crashes
Tabloid: Panic over train inferno threat

Viktor77 · Post by **Viktor77** » Thu May 07, 2015 10:27 am

Salmoneus wrote:Broadsheet: New rules to prevent rail crashes
Tabloid: Panic over train inferno threat

Yes, like that. Rail crashes, nice and succinct, not sensationalist or silly.

This Onion one took me a while:
All Of Child’s Fondest Memories Times When Dad Trying To Make Up For Things

Xephyr · Post by **Xephyr** » Thu May 07, 2015 3:32 pm

pharazon wrote:
Kereb wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:
Matrix wrote: The problem is the word 'by'. Mr. Ramsey didn't lose 122 to 84, according to the article - he lost by 122 to 84. That means that he got 122 votes less than 84.
Huh? No, "122 to 84" is what he lost by. That was the score he lost by. Your reading wouldn't make sense at all, regardless of the numbers. You can say "lost by five votes", but "lost by five votes to twelve" means you got 5 and they got 12, not that they got twelve and you got seven!
^^^ this.

when giving scores like this, "122 to 84" / "5 to 3" / "12 to 5" makes kind of a phrase unit that may or may not take "by" but means the same thing.
I agree that Salmoneus' reading must be the one intended, but maybe there's a dialect issue that's causing confusion here. I would say "lost by a score of 5 to 2" or "lost 5 to 2" or "lost by 3 points/runs/goals/etc.", but never "lost by 5 to 2".

Just throwing my voice in to say that I'm in the exact same boat as Pharazon here. "He lost by 122 votes to 84" is almost nonsensical to me.

jal · Post by **jal** » Fri May 08, 2015 5:19 am

Xephyr wrote:Just throwing my voice in to say that I'm in the exact same boat as Pharazon here. "He lost by 122 votes to 84" is almost nonsensical to me.

As a non-native speaker my $.02 may be off, but for me, "by" in "to lose by X" means that X is the margin between the loser and the winning amount. So "Y lost by 2 seconds" means that the difference between Y and the winning time (or required time, or whatever) is 2 seconds. This is exemplified in a sentence like "Ed Milliband lost by a great margin". However, Merriam Webster lists an interesdting example: "We lost the game by a score of 4–2." If we agree that this is acceptable, from there it's a small step to say "We lost the game by 4-2", which comes dangerously close to the "lost by 122 votes to 84".

JAL

linguoboy · Post by **linguoboy** » Fri May 08, 2015 9:27 am

BBC: Events mark end of WW2 in Europe

Well thank goodness y'all finally wrapped that up.

hwhatting · Post by **hwhatting** » Mon May 11, 2015 6:45 am

linguoboy wrote:BBC: Events mark end of WW2 in Europe

Well thank goodness y'all finally wrapped that up.

I bet you'll be able to re-use that remark at least once per decade at least until 20145.

zompist bboard

Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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