classic crash blossom (avant la lettre)

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:39 AM -0400 9/28/10, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>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:

Right; in this case it's the revealing that would have been the
missing verb or participle, as in

FREED FOREIGN PRISONER REVEALED TO HAVE MURDERED AGAIN

--so the headline writer was boxed in by the order of events and the
limit on words.

LH

>
>"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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org