Confusion Caused by Crash Blossoms

http://www.good.is/post/confusion-caused-by-crash-blossoms/


Linguists give a name to an old headline hazard.

If brevity is the soul of wit, it is also the trapdoor of ridiculousness—at least in the world of headlines, which have long been prone to unintentional comedy along the lines of “Woman Better after Being Thrown from High-rise” and “Scientists Are at Loss Due to Brain-eating Amoeba.”

Now there’s a name for the phenomenon of ambiguously or bizarrely worded headlines: “crash blossoms,” as suggested by a poster at the Testy Copy Editors site in response to the headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms.” Whoever crafted that nugget of nonsense was trying to say that the musician’s career flourished after a plane crash, but the odd syntax and unintentional coinage of “crash blossoms” flummoxed readers. The example quickly mutated into a term, which was soon picked up by John McIntyre, the Language Loggers, and beyond. A near-perfect example was shared by Laurence Horn (via Steve Anderson) on the American Dialect Society listserv recently: “McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers“. As Stan Carey pointed out, one punctuation mark would have made the meaning clear: “McDonald’s fries: the holy grail for potato farmers.” But if you read the headline as is and in the most direct way, you might wonder what potato farmers and McDonald’s have against the holy grail, when McDonald’s found the sacred chalice, and why its mysteries are better plumbed when fried. That’s the kind of humorous mental journey a good crash blossom can inspire.

The Columbia Journalism Review has been on the crash-blossom case a long time, most notably publishing the book Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim and Other Flubs from the Nation’s Press (compiled by Gloria Cooper in 1980). This collection has many a howler, including grisly humor (“Lawmen from Mexico Barbecue Guests,” “Lucky Man Sees Pals Die”), physical impossibilities (“Genetic Engineering Splits Scientists,” “Milk Drinkers Turn to Powder”), logical absurdities (“War Dims Hopes for Peace”), inadvertent racism (“Greeks Fine Hookers”), unknowing sleaziness (“Prostitutes Appeal to Pope,” “Pastor Aghast at First Lady Sex Position”), ew-provoking nastiness (“Child’s Stool Great for Use in Garden”), and innovative adventures in law enforcement (“Juvenile Court to Try Shooting Defendant,” “Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case”).

The word “headline” itself has a far less colorful history, but it does have some highlights, as collected by the Oxford English Dictionary. In the early 1600s, it meant “One of the ropes that make a sail fast to the yard,” but by later in that decade “headline” was used in a way similar to its current meaning, though in reference to letter-writing. It wasn’t until the 20th century that “hitting (or making) the headlines” came into vogue, and since 1927, the crash blossom-prone style of headlines has informed the word “headlinese,” meaning “The elliptical style of language characteristic of the headlines, esp. in popular newspapers.” Here’s the first known use: “In the headlines of general newspapers you see time after time such words as ‘Probe’, ‘Quiz’, ‘Tilt’, ‘Pact’, etc. In Newspaper offices such language is referred to as ‘Headlinese’. We banned it from the headlines of The Daily.” A 1966 quote highlights the brevity that often leads to crash blossoms and other problems: “In headlinese you don’t marry, you wed… You don’t advance arguments against, you score.”

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I love ambiguous and poorly-worded headlines.

K&R

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