See this article from the New York Times below with other wonderful examples where the removal of small key words created ambiguity of language, and a few laughs:
On Language - Crash Blossoms
By Ben Zimmer
Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband,
Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down
his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she
wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.”
In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like
Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they
kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years
past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen
Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles
Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of
ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog
Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”
For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines.
Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion
forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the
headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash
blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the
successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan
Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested
that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines
that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.
After I mentioned the coinage of “crash blossoms” on the linguistics
blog Language Log, having been alerted to it by the veteran Baltimore Sun copy
editor John E. McIntyre, new examples came flooding in. Linguists love this sort
of thing, because the perils of ambiguity can reveal the limits of our ability
to parse sentences correctly. Syntacticians often refer to the garden-path
phenomenon, wherein a reader is led down one interpretive route before having
to double back to the beginning of the sentence to get on the right track.
One of my favorite crash blossoms is this gem from the Associated
Press, first noted by the Yale linguistics professor Stephen R. Anderson last
September: “McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers.” If you take
“fries” as a verb instead of a noun, you’re left wondering why a fast-food
chain is cooking up sacred vessels. Or consider this headline, spotted earlier
this month by Rick Rubenstein on the Total Telecom Web site: “Google Fans Phone
Expectations by Scheduling Android Event.” Here, if you read “fans” as a plural
noun, then you might think “phone” is a verb, and you’ve been led down a path
where Google devotees are calling in their hopes.
Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact,
the hallmarks of the crash blossom. Take this headline, often attributed to The
Guardian: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” In the correct reading, “left”
is a noun and “waffles” is a verb, but it’s much more entertaining to reverse
the two, conjuring the image of breakfast food hastily abandoned in the South
Atlantic. Similarly, crossword enthusiasts laughed nervously at a May 2006
headline on AOL News, “Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts.”
After encountering enough crash blossoms, you start to realize that
English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly
inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their
grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And
it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense
verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and
written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty
because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of
interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles,
auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context.
If that A.P. headline had read “McDonald’s Fries Are the Holy
Grail for Potato Farmers,” there would have been no crash blossom for our
enjoyment.
Headline writers have long been counseled to beware of ambiguity.
“Ambiguous words often lead to ludicrous and puzzling headline statements,”
Grant Milnor Hyde wrote in his 1915 manual, “Newspaper Editing.” “They can be
avoided only by great care in the use of words with two meanings and especially
words that may be used either as nouns or verbs.” More recently, in the 2003
book “Strategic Copy Editing,” the University of Oregon journalism professor
John Russial offered this rule of thumb: “As the word count drops, the
likelihood of ambiguity increases.” He advises copy editors to think twice
about trimming the little words.
The potential for unintended humor in “compressed” English isn’t
restricted to headline writing; it goes back to the days of the telegraph. One
clever (though possibly apocryphal) example once appeared in the pages of Time magazine: Cary Grant received a telegram from an
editor inquiring, “HOW OLD CARY GRANT?” — to which he responded: “OLD CARY
GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?” The omitted verb may have saved the sender a nickel, but
the snappy comeback was worth far more.
The
space limitations of telegrams are echoed now in the terse messages of texting
and Twitter. News headlines, however, are not so
constrained these days, since many of them appear in online outlets rather than
in print. (And many print headlines are supplanted online by more elastic
“e-heads.”) But even when they are unfettered by narrow newspaper columns,
headline writers still sweep away those little words as a matter of
journalistic style. As long as there is such a thing as headlinese, we can
count on crash blossoms continuing to blossom.
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