At first I was puzzled by the lead headline in the October 1 NYT:
E.P.A. PROPOSES
NEW REGULATIONS
ON PLANT GASES
Plant gases? Like exudations from onions? Or the fragrance of lilacs?
No, not plants the living organisms, but “power plants and large industrial facilities” (as the article puts it). I’m not entirely sure why the ‘living plant’ sense of plant gas is so much easier for me to retrieve than the ‘industrial plant’ sense, but there it is.
It might be a mistake to bring up ambiguous or hard-to-interpret headlines here, since the mention of one usually results in a cascade of further examples, including many old favorites (as in the recent “crash blossoms” thread in Language Log).
