classic crash blossom (avant la lettre)

[Joel S. Berson]

How hard could it have been to think of "Freed foreign prisoner
*murders* again"?  And it's even one letter shorter!

But perhaps the headline writer was led down the garden path by the
past tense used in the first sentence of the article:

"A convict freed in the foreign prisoner fiasco went on to commit a
murder, the Government has revealed."

Joel

At 9/28/2010 11:22 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>I just found this in my files, culled from one of Michael Quinion's
>e-newsletters, back before we were displaying such examples under the
>"crash blossom" banner.  (I suspect that what makes the garden path
>more likely here is the preference for participial rather than
>indicative syntax--or at least indicative syntax involving the
>preterit--in headlinese.)
>
>=============
>WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 494           Saturday 1 July 2006
>
>[thanks to] Anne O'Brien Lloyd, we learned that headlinese also struck the
>Daily Mail on Thursday:
>"Freed foreign prisoner murdered again".
>
>How unlucky can a former prisoner get?
>==============
>
>LH
>
>P.S.  Here's the actual story if anyone is keeping track:
>http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-393201/Freed-foreign-prisoner-murdered-again.html

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