Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

[Salmoneus]

OK BBC, hire some damn proofreaders!

Here's their caption from a photo:
Air Accident investigators are investigating why the plane crashed, seen here at North Weald, in Essex, last month,

(No, I didnt miss out the end of it, that's the whole sentence. No, I don't know why they decided to end this sentence with a comma...)

[GreenBowTie]

Gaylord wins tax breaks by saying yes to prom

[KathTheDragon]

What's the problem with that one?

[Thry]

yes to [going to] prom as opposed to yes to [passing some law about, doing stuff, allowing, idk] prom? personifying Gaylord i bet

[GreenBowTie]

What's the problem with that one?

grammatically, nothing, but i mean come on

[alynnidalar]

I would likely find that funnier if I haven't been to the city of Gaylord enough times in my life to not find the name notable anymore, tbh.

[Salmoneus]

Oh, I thought Gaylord was a person.

[Bristel]

I thought Gaylord was just a less common insult for someone who is gay... and I read it that way... >_>

[Zju]

ULA is a Dick Blue Box

Halfway through the article.

[linguoboy]

Not a gardenpath, just a really embarrassing typo: "[Tropical Storm] Erika's Cone Shits East: What That Means for Millions in the Southeast".

[linguoboy]

From the hello thread:

In terms of languages, I'm particularly interested in dead languages like Latin (like everyone else my age, lol), Japanese, and German.

[Travis B.]

From the hello thread:

In terms of languages, I'm particularly interested in dead languages like Latin (like everyone else my age, lol), Japanese, and German.

I interpreted that as meaning that, in their time, Japanese and German are dead languages.

[Viktor77]

Chris Evans Wants to Extended Contract With Marvel

Usually you can read over a typo but in this case you don't know out of the two possible meanings which was intended ie. 'wants to extend contract' or 'wants extended contract.'

[jal]

Usually you can read over a typo but in this case you don't know out of the two possible meanings which was intended ie. 'wants to extend contract' or 'wants extended contract.'

I see they fixed it, apparently it's the former.


JAL

[Salmoneus]

National Catholic Reporter website:
Francis’ annulment changes stress prompt decisions, power of local bishops

Twisty...

[jal]

A Dutch one:

'Eigen motivatie vinden belangrijkst bij stoppen met roken'

It's made worse by the way it's laid out on the front page:

Eigen motivatie vinden
belangrijkst bij stoppen
met roken.

The gardenpath here is that "vinden", "to find", can mean both "to have an opionion about" and "to find after searching" (like in English), but that the former is more frequent, especially in news headlines. That means that "Eigen motivatie" would be the subject to "vinden", but since it's singular, that doesn't parse ("vinden" is plural). After "vinden" you'd expect to read what the opinion is, but "belangrijkst bij stoppen met roken" is just a superlative + pp-phrase, so that doesn't parse either. I had to read this about 10 times before it dawned on me that "vinden" is meant as "after searching", and that "eigen motivatie" is the object, not the subject, of a gerund "eigen motivatie vinden" (which in turn is the subject of "(is het) belangrijkst bij (...)"). So, my first reading translates to something like:

"Own motiviation have the opinion most important when quitting smoking"

while what is meant is:

"Finding own motivation (is) most important when quitting smoking"


JAL

[Salmoneus]

That almost works in English. It shouldn't, because we don't have that ambiguity between 'finding' and 'find'. However, 'find' can also be a noun, and it's fashionable to talk about zero-derived nouns in managementspeak. I've never heard "motivation find" as a noun, but I can totally believe that it might be used by That Sort of Person. So "self-motivation find most important factor in quitting smoking" can be read as grammatical (and garden-pathy) in English too.

There's also a potential object-fronting ambiguity: "self-motivation find scientists is key to quitting smoking" is grammatical (though rare) headline speak (as they don't like punctuation). So at a stretch your example could mean any of four things:
a) Self-Motivation (presumably the name of a pressure group or self-help company* or something) have found the most important factor in quitting smoking
b) The most important factor (would require context to explain what they were a factor in) have found self-motivation in quitting smoking
c) a specific concrete discovery of self-motivation is going to be the most important factor in quitting smoking (like "skeleton find most important discovery in study of human origins")
d) finding self-motivation is the most important factor in quitting smoking. [Which, obviously, it is, as it is for all addictions and indeed for all behaviour change]

[jal]

Here's another one in Dutch. Not so much gardenpathy, but easy to misread at first: Kabinet en Rijksmuseum dicht bij aankoop beroemde Rembrandts. The problem lies with "dicht", which could mean both "closed" and "close", and "bij" which could mean "when"/"at" (in case of the former) or "by"/"to" (in case of the latter). What I read was "Government and Rijksmuseum are going to close / are closed when famous Rembrandt paintings are bought", while the intended reading was "G and R close to buying famous R".


JAL

[Salmoneus]

The guy with the clock is really taxing the syntax of the BBC. The original story was something like "Boy with clock thought to be bomb held by police", but they got rid of that one quickly for something less mind-bending. The latest update is the more straightforward, yet steampunkish, "homemade clock boy quits texas school"...

Meanwhile elsewhere, an actor's roles are described:
"He recently appearanced in the role of Dogsborough, a parody of Paul Von Hindenburg in Bertold Brecht's "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" A play written by Brecht in 1941 parodying the atrocities in Nazi Germany and in The Crucible at the Old Vic."

[linguoboy]

Hackers Took Fingerprints of 5.6 Million US Workers, Government Says

[hwhatting]

Hackers Took Fingerprints of 5.6 Million US Workers, Government Says

Quite an organizational feat...

[linguoboy]

PRIVATE
DOGS
NOT ALLOWED

[jal]

PRIVATE
DOGS
NOT ALLOWED

As opposed to PUBLIC DOGS?


JAL

[jal]

"They’re all about making sure only people like them get to be part of a community." - Had to read that a couple of times before it dawned on me that "like" isn't a verb taking "them" as object.


JAL

[Salmoneus]

This one, from Variety, genuinely had me utterly baffled to the point of wondering whether the author just couldn't speak English, until I figured it out:

Darin, Camera take actor for ‘Truman,’ Ariosa (“’The King of Havana’) actress and Joachim Lafosse (‘White Knights’) director.