HDAS rides again!

[Mark Mandel]

What Theodore Bernstein would have called a two-faced head.

m a m

On 7/10/07, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In HDAS, one finds the following:
>
> "_behind_ prep. Esp. Black E. 2.b. because of; from; as a result of, etc."
>
> In the Friday, July 6, 2007 edition of The Boston Globe, I read the
> following headline:
>
> "Cleaner Streets Behind Towing."
>
> I thought: Oh. Okay. Towing parked cars makes it easier to clean the
> streets. Cleaner streets have come about as a result of the towing of
> parked cars out of the way of the streetsweepers.
>
> However, after I read the article, it became clear that The Globe had
> not hired any monodialectal BE-speaking headline-writers. Rather, it
> turned out that what the headline was meant to convey was that the
> _desire_ for cleaner streets was _motivating_ the towing of parked
> cars and not that the _towing_ of parked cars was _resulting_ in
> cleaner streets.
>
> -Wilson
>
>

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