In a mailing from the Association for Psychological Science, an abstract for this fascinating-sounding article (by Yigal Attali) in Psychological Science (April 29, 2013):
Perceived Hotness Affects Behavior of Basketball Players and Coaches
Ah, you ask, whose perceived hotness? And perceived by whom? Many people think that basketball players are hot hot hot, and I assume the players know this, so it might well affect their behavior.
Oh, not that kind of hot. [Emily Litella mode] Never mind.
(On Weinergate, see here.) Widely reported on the net. Surely intentional. This is the Post, after all. Now from the same source, we get this double-entendre paraphrase of Weiner’s words:
What the story said:
Anthony Weiner was still playing coy yesterday about entering the mayoral race, but if he gets in, he said, he intends to be a real contender.
“If I decide to run, it’s because I think I can win,” he told reporters outside his Park Avenue South apartment. Anthony Weiner was still playing coy yesterday about entering the mayoral race, but if he gets in, he said, he intends to be a real contender.
“If I decide to run, it’s because I think I can win,” he told reporters outside his Park Avenue South apartment.
Yesterday’s posting on ambiguity in headlines looked at:
Racing star could prove Einstein’s theory
which for a moment I didn’t interpret correctly (with racing star‘ (astronomical) star that is racing’), since I was hung up on racing star ‘a (figurative) star in/of/for racing’. The puzzle is about my mental processes: why didn’t I see the intended interpretation, when it was so clearly signaled by the content of the headline and by the accompanying photo? (Most people probably got the inteded interpretation right off.)
Then in the NYT yesterday, a teaser headline on p. 1:
Fraud Claims Dog Operative
which I read, at first, as having the subject fraud, the verb claims, and the direct object dog operative (a N + N compound: ‘operative that is a dog’), while the intended interpretation has the subject fraud claims, the verb dog, and the direct object operative. Again, many people will have zoomed right in on the intended interpretation, but apparently I was reluctant to posit the verb dog ‘follow closely and persistently’ (which does occur in ordinary text, but finds its natural home in headlines, because of its brevity).
That poor dog operative, done in by fraud. With the assistance of my mental processes.
There are some topics I keep coming back to, often with reservations about whether I’m just piling up more and more examples of familiar types and falling into the temptation to accumulate all the instances of this type — an impossible goal. In a few cases, I’ve asked people not to send me more data (I really don’t need any more examples of the snowclone The New Y, as in Pink is the new black) or to send me cases only if they’re especially interesting: for instance, two-part back-formed verbs (latest: to recess appoint, to pleasure read, to pinpoint-strike), portmanteaus (they tend to come up in all sorts of contexts; see mocktail, here), crash blossoms (in the last week, one posting on this blog and two on Language Log), and noun pileups (last posting here a week ago).
The danger is completism, the urge to completeness or comprehensiveness.
Not actually a crash blossom, but the headline did give me a moment of puzzlement. In today’s (Palo Alto) Daily News:
Eastside’s press does in Castilleja
Some of the puzzlement is cleared up by noting that the story appeared in the sports section of the paper, and that it was about a (women’s) basketball game between two local prep schools, Eastside and Castilleja. That tells us that press refers to a style or strategy of play in basketball, the full-court press. Context is crucial.
Then we’re left with does in, which could have the noun form does, plural of doe, in it, but that’s really unlikely. So we’ve got the verb form does, 3sg pres of do. The final decision is between the parsing
[ does ] [ in Castilleja ]
and
[ does in ] [ Castilleja ].
I went initially for the first, but realizing that didn’t make sense, finally settled on the (intended) reading with a form of the verbal idiom do in ‘kill, conquer’.
Sports fans, especially local ones, probably had not a moment of indecision in reading the headline.
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).
That’s the summary-page version of the longer Yorkshire Post headline
Barnsley 3 Crystal Palace 1: Tykes ease drop fears after storming Palace’s defences
(from Chris Waigl). Like the baffling
GERS’ KIRK IN EGG BLAST
recently reported by Geoff Pullum on Language Log, Tykes ease drop fears can be parsed, in the sense that each word can be assigned to a part of speech and a constituent structure can be assigned to the whole thing, but it’s not interpretable without inside knowledge.
