Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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

Post by linguoboy »

From a discussion of movies vs books:
Maze Runner; they took out the unnecessary romance in the movie and the whole thing was drastically improved.
Not knowing offhand whether the book was a novelisation of movie or the movie an adaptation of the book, I can't tell which had the romance and which had it removed.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Vijay »

I interpret that as saying that the movie is an adaptation of the book without the allegedly unnecessary romance present in the latter.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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linguoboy wrote:From a discussion of movies vs books:
Maze Runner; they took out the unnecessary romance in the movie and the whole thing was drastically improved.
Not knowing offhand whether the book was a novelisation of movie or the movie an adaptation of the book, I can't tell which had the romance and which had it removed.
I'd use “from” if I was talking about the former case (assuming it's grammatical English).
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Vijay »

Pole, the wrote:
linguoboy wrote:From a discussion of movies vs books:
Maze Runner; they took out the unnecessary romance in the movie and the whole thing was drastically improved.
Not knowing offhand whether the book was a novelisation of movie or the movie an adaptation of the book, I can't tell which had the romance and which had it removed.
I'd use “from” if I was talking about the former case (assuming it's grammatical English).
I think that could work.

At any rate, apparently, the movie series is based on the series of novels, so I guess I was right.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Salmoneus »

Another example of the Beeb's "throw all the words at the sentence" style of headline, perplexing less for ambiguity than for sheer overload:

Dog down Blaina mountain hole rescue effort abandoned.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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No garden-path here, just your daily WTF: Navy apologizes for sky penis (Slate)

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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While the serious debate is around whether his admissions make him a sexual assaulter who must be thrown from office, my interest in Ohio Supreme Court Judge Bill O'Neill's recent confession is primarily in his hilarious parsing ambiguities. To quote:

"[he had sex with women when he was younger]. It ranged from a gorgeous personal secretary to Senator Bob Taft (senior) who was my first true love and we made passionate love in the hayloft of her parents barn in Gallipolis and ended with a drop dead gorgeous red head..."

Senator Taft, sadly, is deceased, and unable to confirm or deny the reports.
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But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by alice »

From the front page of today's edition of not-the-Daily Mail:

MIRACLE BLOOD
PRESSURE PILL
Zompist's Markov generator wrote:it was labelled" orange marmalade," but that is unutterably hideous.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Pole, the »

alice wrote:From the front page of today's edition of not-the-Daily Mail:

MIRACLE BLOOD
PRESSURE PILL
/r/dontdeadopeninside?
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by KathTheDragon »

I don't see the problem here.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

Post by Vijay »

I thought maybe it was that it initially looked like two separate phrases, each on a separate line, instead of one whole phrase divided between two lines. Idk.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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Vijay wrote:I thought maybe it was that it initially looked like two separate phrases, each on a separate line, instead of one whole phrase divided between two lines. Idk.
Ditto. I read it as a pressure pill to get miracle blood, or perhaps a pressure pill made of miracle blood.


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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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A sentence from my novel today: "I...read the paper soup to nuts".

"From soup to nuts" isn't part of my speech and seems hardly used nowadays. (I only know it from an old hardware store slogan.) So I initially took "paper soup" to be a florid description of the weekend New York Times (it's that sort of novel) and was trying to figure out how you'd read something "to nuts".

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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linguoboy wrote:A sentence from my novel today: "I...read the paper soup to nuts".
That reminds me, you still didn't tell us which novel you're reading. :-)

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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hwhatting wrote:
linguoboy wrote:A sentence from my novel today: "I...read the paper soup to nuts".
That reminds me, you still didn't tell us which novel you're reading. :-)
Ah, but he did.


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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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jal wrote:
hwhatting wrote:
linguoboy wrote:A sentence from my novel today: "I...read the paper soup to nuts".
That reminds me, you still haven't told us which novel you're reading. :-)
Ah, but he did.
To be fair, at the time he posted, I hadn't.

(Really I'm just replying because it gives me an oh-so-rare chance to correct H-W. And even in this case there are native speakers of American English who would use still with the simple past exactly as he did.)

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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linguoboy wrote:
jal wrote:
hwhatting wrote:
linguoboy wrote:A sentence from my novel today: "I...read the paper soup to nuts".
That reminds me, you still haven't told us which novel you're reading. :-)
Ah, but he did.
To be fair, at the time he posted, I hadn't.

(Really I'm just replying because it gives me an oh-so-rare chance to correct H-W. And even in this case there are native speakers of American English who would use still with the simple past exactly as he did.)
British English too. Now that you've 'corrected' him, I'd agree I'd probably mostly be more likely to use the perfect, but the simple past works fine for me too. I'm not sure why, though, since this does feel like the sort of situation where it normally shouldn't.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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Subtitle of a blog post: How historically boy reluctant readers have become avid readers via comics.

I do not know what's going on with that pile-up at the head of the sentence.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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linguoboy wrote:Subtitle of a blog post: How historically boy reluctant readers have become avid readers via comics.

I do not know what's going on with that pile-up at the head of the sentence.
Is "boy reluctant readers" supposed to mean "people who were reluctant readers as boys"? Very strange.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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hwhatting wrote:
linguoboy wrote:Subtitle of a blog post: How historically boy reluctant readers have become avid readers via comics.

I do not know what's going on with that pile-up at the head of the sentence.
Is "boy reluctant readers" supposed to mean "people who were reluctant readers as boys"? Very strange.
I honestly don't know, and even the body of the post doesn't really make it clear, so I've asked for clarification.

I think I'd be fine with it if not for that awkwardly-placed "historically". (I suspect "reluctant reader" may be a term of art, which is why it's being qualified with "boy".)

ETA: The author responded to my query by rephrasing it to "Comics and Boys: Turning reluctant readers into avid readers via comics". Before that, another reader suggested setting "historically" off in commas, which I'm not sure yileds the same meaning.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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Don't get the ambiguity in this own. Seems straightfoward, though it's certainly inelegant to repeat 'readers'.

They're saying that, historically, comic books played an important role in encouraging boy reluctant readers to enjoy reading.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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Salmoneus wrote:They're saying that, historically, comic books played an important role in encouraging boy reluctant readers to enjoy reading.
Except the post is all about using comic books here and now to seduce boys into reading. There's not really any historical dimension.

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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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linguoboy wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:There's not really any historical dimension.
Boys have always been reluctant readers? So it's something like "Boys, who historically are reluctant readers, have become (...)"


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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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linguoboy wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:They're saying that, historically, comic books played an important role in encouraging boy reluctant readers to enjoy reading.
Except the post is all about using comic books here and now to seduce boys into reading. There's not really any historical dimension.
I don't think that's a syntax issue, just a journalistic one. Articles that say "Historically, tax reform has been difficult to pass" or "Midterms have always been difficult for sitting presidents" but that go on to talk 90% about upcoming attempts at tax reform, or upcoming midterms, have always been widespread, historically. It's a way of framing your thesis to seem to have more universal force, and of making your article look more educational and informative than it really is. Presumably the underlying premise is induction: X has historically been the case, therefore it is still the case. So, even if he's not proving that comics were historically good for boy reluctant readers, maybe he thought that the headline was enough to establish a premise that people would agree with, before going on to draw a parallel with modern times in the body. Headlines aren't always just summaries of the article, after all. And articles that don't live up to the promise of the headline are very common (ironically, more so in professional journalism, as article writers and headline writers are usually different people), and not really a syntactic issue per se.
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Re: Confusing headlines and other trips down the garden path

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Kennedy Center Honors Evoke Politics, Even Without Trump

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