In Headlines
Newspaper headlines are written in a telegraphic style (headlinese) which often omits the copula and therefore lends itself to syntactic ambiguity, usually of the garden path type. The name 'crash blossoms' was proposed for these ambiguous headlines by Dan Bloom and Mike O'Connell in the Testy Copy Editors discussion group in August 2009 based on a headline "Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms". The Columbia Journalism Review regularly reprints such headlines in its "The Lower case" column, and has collected them in the anthologies Squad helps dog bite victim and Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.
Many purported crash blossoms are actually apocryphal or recycled. One celebrated one from World War I is "French push bottles up German rear"; life imitated art in the Second World War headline "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans".
Read more about this topic: Syntactic Ambiguity
Famous quotes containing the word headlines:
“Everything known before it happens; and headlines twice the size of the events.”
—John Galsworthy (1867–1933)
“There’s a long story, my friend. I never did like the idea of sitting on newspapers. I did it once and all the headlines came off on my white pants. On the level, it actually happened. Nobody bought a paper that day. They just followed me around over town and read the news off the seat of my pants.”
—Robert Riskin (1897–1955)