Subject: Headline and grouping

[Brian Hitchcock]

Yes, we do, and here are a few reasons why we do:



Firstly, "looking ahead" is absolutely necessary for reading ALOUD in
English, particularly poetry, so as to determine the appropriate "rhythm".
One has to parse the whole line or sentence, in one's mind, before one can
apply the proper stress to the spoken words, so as to make one's reading
easily understood.



In addition, Americans seem have a great tendency to form extended noun
groupings, generally of the form:

[noun1  noun2. {adjective} nounx finalnoun];  where nouns 1 through x are
construed to form, jointly, an adjective to be applied to "finalnoun".
High-tech companies (Microsoft is one egregious example) tend to do this
regularly with technical terminology. I invite you to read any technical
material from Microsoft; you will soon encounter stacks of up to four or
five nouns, all but the final one meant to *jointly* modify the final noun.
Often, such technical companies invent TLAs (three-letter acronyms) or FLAs
(four-letter acronyms) to represent their most-commonly-used noun-stack
jargon. Soon afterwards, they start stacking more nouns before and/or after
the TLA or FLA.



So, I suggest that readers who are familiar with such tech-talk tend to
learn to watch out for [seemingly interminable multiple nouns and/or
adjectives constituting a single adjective construction ](which, of course,
I would help the reader digest by rendering it as "seemingly interminable,
multiple-nouns-constituting-a-single-adjective construction".)  Sadly, the
coiners of such an impenetrable construction generally fail to include any
hyphens or commas to help the reader to parse it.



I believe that the ability to look ahead while reading, and to consider
multiple alternate "parsings", is indeed required (even in examples such as
you gave, where the problem is discerning a *verb* among the nouns, rather
than discerning which nouns jointly constitute an *adjective*).



As for the original example, the headline could have been made perfectly
clear without lengthening it.

            Apple: iPhones Don't Store User Location



Brian Hitchcock

Technical Writer

Harbor City, California USA

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