headline humor source

[Mai Kuha]

I finally got a copy of that book that Larry mentioned, "Squad Helps Dog
Bite Victim and other flubs from the nation's press", and learned from it
that the Columbia Journalism Review has a regular feature with such items,
called "The Lower case". It is on the inside back cover of each issue. Some
headlines are funny but linguistically not-so-interesting typos or inanities
("Journalists say voters hold key to November election"), but most issues
have at least a couple of nice examples of syntactic or scope ambiguity or
something else of interest (in the most recent issue, "Police Stop Slaying
Suspect Look-alikes" and "Panda Lectures This Week at National Zoo").
mk