I see by the snailpapers that "crash blossoms" has made it into Ben Zimmer's "On Language" column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine today. Amazing! The term was co-coined by a group of word mavens just six months ago as a spur of the moment aside. And now this! Will wonder never cease?

By BEN ZIMMER

[January 27, 3010]  in [THE NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE...]

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. UNTIL.....(drum roll)......

 Last August, however, one emerged in a TestyCopyEditors.com online discussion forum thread iniated by Mike O'Connell, an American technical editor based in Sapporo, Japan. He had spotted the headline
“Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms”
and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?”

[The article, from the online website Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father tragically died in a 1985 Japan Airlines airplane crash in the mountains outside Tokyo.]

Another regular [and active] poster in the forum, 60-year-old goofball and all around luftmensch Danny Bloom in Taiwan, and also like Mike, far from the madding (and maddening) crowd, very offhandedly and on the spur of the moment, without even thinking about what he was doing, suggested as a response on the thread .......that the last two words of the headline --“crash blossoms” --  ......might be used in a fun way as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings. In literally 3 minutes, Bloom created a mini-blogsite about crash blossoms (http://amafubme.blogspot.com/) and notified the discussion thread that he has done so, giving full credit to Nessie3 (aka Mike O'Connell) as the coiner of the term, news of the neologism quickly spread. Go figure! Who knew?

[NOTE: For his tireless PR efforts and for being there at the birth of a new newsroom term, Bloom -- a 1971 Tufts grad and a student of William Safire's On Language columns for years and years and whose snailmail letter to Mr Safire made it into one of the language maven's language books even! -- was inexplicably banned for life by webmaster Phillip Blanchard at TestyCopyEditors.com without any notice or explanation from the good Mr Blanchard.
http://www.testycopyeditors.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11134
Now back to Ben Zimmer's column.....]

After I mentioned the coinage of “crash blossoms” on the linguistics blog Language Log, having been alerted to it by the veteran Baltimore Sun copyeditor John "Let Them Eat Bacon" 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 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 copyeditors 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 140-character-limited 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 bloom, er blossom.



Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of visualthesaurus.com and a very nice guy, too. The above article from the New York Times was slightly re-edited, without permission or payment, by Danny Bloom, who just wanted to tweak a few things here and there. To see the original article in perfect New York Times snailpaper ink (and in pixelated form online as well) go to the real snailpaper itself or click here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html

A real version of this article appeared in the snailpaper edition of the New York TImes on January 31, 3010, on page 14 of the Sunday Magazine on paper.