Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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jal
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by jal »

linguoboy wrote:If you don't, it must be completely opaque:
Indeed. I'd parse it as "foam" being a verb, "spill" a noun (with "tomahawks" being attributive to it), and apparently, the brave people foamed the tomahawks spill onto the I-75 (a road?) which is either South in Cobb (which I take to be a geographical designation, perhaps a city or part of a city), or we're talking about a specific part of the I-75 that's South in Cobb.


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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Salmoneus »

jal wrote:
linguoboy wrote:If you don't, it must be completely opaque:
Indeed. I'd parse it as "foam" being a verb, "spill" a noun (with "tomahawks" being attributive to it), and apparently, the brave people foamed the tomahawks spill onto the I-75 (a road?) which is either South in Cobb (which I take to be a geographical designation, perhaps a city or part of a city), or we're talking about a specific part of the I-75 that's South in Cobb.


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More likely the verb is "spill", and foam tomahawks of the Braves variety (that is, pretend axes made out of "foam" associated with fans of, or perhaps overtly branded with the branding of, a sports club called the Braves) spilled on onto the road.

I was helped massively there by cultural context - knowing that "braves" and "tomahawks" are often associated, that lots of American sports fans are weirdly and enthusiastically racially insensitive*, and that sports fans, particularly in america, often wave large plastic replicas of things.

I was considerably not helped by the lack of an apostrophe on the first word, which points away from the above interpretation. However, on consideration "Braves" can be just a modifying noun - if, say, it's a factory or warehouse full of foam tomahawks that has exploded, intended for but not actually yet aquired by Braves fans, it's probably OK to call them "Braves tomahawks" rather than "Braves' tomahawks".

I was also not helped by the word "foam", which here is being used in a weird sense, I assume, for a solid plastic substance filled with air pockets that is definitely not foam in the normal sense. It is a standard usage - we also talk about 'memory foam' mattresses for instance - but it's not what comes to mind for the word "foam" outside of certain limited contexts (I'd rarely say "pass that foam", for instance, to mean plastic, though I might say "pass that polystyrene foam").


*I'd be fine with a club calling itself the "Redskins", if they used it as the basis for outreach and representation. But calling a club the "Braves", and having fans dress up as "braves" and wave "tomahawks" around... it's only one step away from calling them the "Minstrels" and having the fans all wear blackface.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Axiem »

I thought it made perfect sense :shrug:
jal wrote:I-75 (a road?)
The "I" stands for "Interstate". All Interstate Highways in America are known as I-(number). For example, St. Louis has I-64, I-44, I-55, I-70, I-170, and I-270 all going through(/around ) it.

Furthermore, odd two-digit numbers are north-south, and even two-digit numbers are east-west, and three-digit numbers are more complicated.

Completely tangential, but one of my favorite diagrams/maps is this one, treating the Interstate Highway System as a Subway Map.

Salmoneus wrote:I was considerably not helped by the lack of an apostrophe on the first word, which points away from the above interpretation. However, on consideration "Braves" can be just a modifying noun - if, say, it's a factory or warehouse full of foam tomahawks that has exploded, intended for but not actually yet aquired by Braves fans, it's probably OK to call them "Braves tomahawks" rather than "Braves' tomahawks".
Yes, it's a modifying noun, indicating the team the foam tomahawk was branded with. They certainly don't belong to the team in question ;) Much like I have a "Cardinals shirt".

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by alynnidalar »

Now there's a good one.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by hwhatting »

What is ambiguous / garden-pathy here?

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Travis B. »

hwhatting wrote:
What is ambiguous / garden-pathy here?
Whether it is the population of moose which is exploding, or the moose themselves which are exploding.
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Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Pole, the »

Travis B. wrote:
hwhatting wrote:
What is ambiguous / garden-pathy here?
Whether it is the population of moose which is exploding, or the moose themselves which are exploding.
I don't think exploding moose.PL would count as a population, though.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by alynnidalar »

Well, maybe they only explode a little bit, so they can survive and continue living. I dunno.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by mèþru »

[joke]Exploded pieces develop into baby moose, obviously. Isn't that how all mammals reproduce?[/joke]
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Travis B. »

Maybe the moose don't all explode at once, so there is a population of unexploded moose which will explode at some point in the future.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Risla »

Yes, I interpreted "exploding moose" as "the type of moose which has the potential to explode."

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by alice »

Risla wrote:Yes, I interpreted "exploding moose" as "the type of moose which has the potential to explode."
Hey, Risla! Welcome back!

Of course, it's not clear if it's "population of exploding moose" or "exploding population of moose"; the kind of distinction which gives designers of IALs headaches.

Even so, how much is "exploding" anyway? If it's less than doubling, it doesn't sound all that impressive.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by hwhatting »

Travis B. wrote:
hwhatting wrote:
What is ambiguous / garden-pathy here?
Whether it is the population of moose which is exploding, or the moose themselves which are exploding.
Ok, that's the kind of "literal instead of figurative" interpretation I exclude immediately when reading such a headline, especially with it containing a word like "population". But to each their own...

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by linguoboy »

hwhatting wrote:Ok, that's the kind of "literal instead of figurative" interpretation I exclude immediately when reading such a headline, especially with it containing a word like "population". But to each their own...
It's absolutely clear which meaning is intended, and at the same time, it puts an image in your head that you're hard-pressed to ever get out again.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by linguoboy »

From the Wikipedia article on Sevgi Soysal: "She followed her husband to Germany, where she attended one-year long lectures on archaeology and theatre at the University of Göttingen."

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by hwhatting »

Thats probably a world record. ;-)

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Vijay »

I wonder how long any of the legendary narrations of the Mahabharata took then. I take it that narrating it to Ganesha took less than a year, but then that was because he wrote really fast (not that that matters...).

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by zompist »

Bah, it could be recited in a week. I tried reciting a single śloka; it took about 7 seconds. It has about 100,000 ślokas. 600,000 seconds = 167 hours = 1 week.

Just to double-check, I read 1/3 of a page of the English translation. 42 seconds * 3 * 420 pages (in book one) * 10 books = 529,200 seconds, definitely in the same ball park.

(As a triple-check: the unabridged audiobook of LOTR is about 55 hours. You can get the Bible in 70 hours.)

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Vijay »

But it was supposed to have taken months of nonstop recitation! :o Well, at least according to cartoon version of the story I read when I was growing up :P Oh well, never mind then!

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by linguoboy »

Vijay wrote:But it was supposed to have taken months of nonstop recitation! :o Well, at least according to cartoon version of the story I read when I was growing up :P Oh well, never mind then!
All depends how they do it. When I printed out the libretto for Die Walküre, I remember it being something like twenty pages (in playscript format, so lots of blank space). Yet a typical performance lasts 5-6 hrs.

In the Indonesian novel I'm reading, festive performances of the "entire Mahabharata" as a shadow play take a week.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by linguoboy »

Byline trouble: "It's the second time in about a week someone has broadcast a gruesome killing on Facebook. By David Lohr."

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Salmoneus »

zompist wrote:Bah, it could be recited in a week. I tried reciting a single śloka; it took about 7 seconds. It has about 100,000 ślokas. 600,000 seconds = 167 hours = 1 week.

Just to double-check, I read 1/3 of a page of the English translation. 42 seconds * 3 * 420 pages (in book one) * 10 books = 529,200 seconds, definitely in the same ball park.

(As a triple-check: the unabridged audiobook of LOTR is about 55 hours. You can get the Bible in 70 hours.)
Independent method of calculation:
- a few years ago there was a live reading of the Iliad that took about 16 hours.
- the Iliad is about 18k lines and apparently the Mahabharata is about 200k lines. So let's say ten times as long: about 160 hours.
- or another source suggests about 16k lines in the Iliad (may depend on version, and of course I think this reading was a translation). So maybe 200 hours?
- on the other hand, apparently the M. has "ten times as many words as the Iliad and Odyssey put together". The Odyssey is a bit short than the Iliad, so maybe 300 hours?
- then again, that Iliad reading was 66 different readers, with presumably some change-over time, and declamed poetically rather than read quickly.

So maybe around 1 week if you're going through it at a steady pace, up to 2 weeks if you're being dramatic about it and if there's logistical issues?

To make it last months, you'd have to be either chanting really slowly or else repeating the lines. Or having a lot of interpretive dance interludes.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by hwhatting »

Salmoneus wrote: To make it last months, you'd have to be either chanting really slowly or else repeating the lines. Or having a lot of interpretive dance interludes.
Or you might break for eating, sleeping, and other business... ;-)

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by alynnidalar »

Well, if you did it for just 8 hours a day, it'd take you somewhere between 3-5 weeks.

If you only did it for an hour a day, you could drag it out for 6-10 months.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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