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Friday, May 27th, 2005
Newstickers garden mishandling
Friday, May 27th, 2005 05:23 pmLinguists love examples which point out the quirkier aspects of grammar, and some of our favourites are the so-called "garden path sentences": sentences which lead you up the garden path by making you start parsing them in one way, then confound your expectations.
I recently installed a newsticker extension for Firefox. It's a nice little program which lets me choose RSS feeds and scrolls the titles along the taskbar. Because of the way they scroll in from the right, the need to limit the headlines to a certain number of characters, and the peculiar grammar of news headlines, they provide the reader with a rich source of garden path sentence fragments. Here are a few which made me do a double-take.
"Egypt parties ..." Yay, get down! Actually, it was about Egyptian political parties.
"Kylie has breast ..." I'll refrain from tasteless comments on this one.
"Inquiry finds Koran mishandling ..." What issue does the Koran mishandle?
"Mishandling" seems to be the euphemism of the day. After "collateral damage" for "blowing up civilians" and "abuse" for "torture", we now have "mishandling" for "desecrating".
I recently installed a newsticker extension for Firefox. It's a nice little program which lets me choose RSS feeds and scrolls the titles along the taskbar. Because of the way they scroll in from the right, the need to limit the headlines to a certain number of characters, and the peculiar grammar of news headlines, they provide the reader with a rich source of garden path sentence fragments. Here are a few which made me do a double-take.
"Egypt parties ..." Yay, get down! Actually, it was about Egyptian political parties.
"Kylie has breast ..." I'll refrain from tasteless comments on this one.
"Inquiry finds Koran mishandling ..." What issue does the Koran mishandle?
"Mishandling" seems to be the euphemism of the day. After "collateral damage" for "blowing up civilians" and "abuse" for "torture", we now have "mishandling" for "desecrating".