Confusion Caused by Crash Blossoms

Notice, dear readers, how the layout artist for this webpage was able to somehow take the words in the actual article and put them into the "newspaper" in the illustration. HOW DID HE/SHE DO THAT? IS THERE A APP FOR THIS? I LOVE IT. If you know, leave note in comments below.

Confusion Caused by Crash Blossoms

If brevity is the soul of wit, it is also the trapdoor of ridiculousness—at least in the world of headlines, which have long been prone to unintentional comedy along the lines of “Woman Better after Being Thrown from High-rise” and “Scientists Are at Loss Due to Brain-eating Amoeba.”

Now there’s a name for the phenomenon of ambiguously or bizarrely worded headlines: “crash blossoms,” as suggested by a poster at the Testy Copy Editors site in response to the headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms.”

Whoever crafted that nugget of nonsense was trying to say that the musician’s career flourished after a plane crash, but the odd syntax and unintentional coinage of “crash blossoms” flummoxed readers. The example quickly mutated into a term, which was soon picked up by John McIntyre, the Language Loggers, and beyond.

A near-perfect example was shared by Laurence Horn (via Steve Anderson) on the American Dialect Society listserv recently: "McDonald's fries the holy grail for potato farmers". As Stan Carey pointed out, one punctuation mark would have made the meaning clear: “McDonald’s fries: the holy grail for potato farmers.” But if you read the headline as is and in the most direct way, you might wonder what potato farmers and McDonald’s have against the holy grail, when McDonald’s found the sacred chalice, and why its mysteries are better plumbed when fried. That’s the kind of humorous mental journey a good crash blossom can inspire.