crash blossom of the morning

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Fri Jul 16 17:42:48 UTC 2010


Now LanguageLogged...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2453


On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> Just walked past the USA Today dispenser and noticed this headline on
> today's paper:
>
> BP Caps Ruptured Well, But More Hurdles Ahead
>
> My first thought was that I had watched the news last night and I
> don't remember seeing anything about the caps rupturing.  Then I
> realized "BP caps" wasn't the subject, "ruptured" wasn't the main
> verb, and "well" wasn't an adverb.  (I suppose if I had thought about
> it, it would have also occurred to me that it would be harder for a
> cap to rupture well than for a knee, say, to break cleanly.)
>

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