Pretty little girls' school

Since the bulk of my mail is bulk mail, I try to make the best of a bad situation by deriving what amusement I can from reading the headers. Some of them are amusingly ironic (as a friend of mine commented, why do they call medications to make you hard “soft tabs”?). Some are poetic or intriguingly cryptic. Some contain interesting abuse of the English language, and some even reveal its inadequacies. Take this one, for example: “Wow huge enlargement patch sale!” Now, apart from the missing comma after “wow”, there is nothing as an English teacher that I can fault in this sentence. (Those who insist on the presence of a verb are merely being pedantic: this is an ejaculation, if you’ll pardon the choice of words.) The ambiguity is endemic to English, and so the sentence could mean:

1. a huge sale of enlargement patches;
2. a sale of huge patches which produce enlargement;
3. a sale of patches which produce huge enlargement.

This is one reason why NLP has a long way to go. As a human reader (and a male one at that) I was easily able to guess what was being enlarged, and thus work out that #1 (or possibly #3) was the intended meaning, even though at first glance, I read it as #2. How an artificial intelligence is supposed to deal with this is beyond me.