Plant gases

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).

Tykes ease drop fears

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.