Some years ago this surprising headline appeared in a local newspaper: “Man Shot by Police in Court”. The reader who alerted me to it commented that “police don’t usually carry guns in court” (this is New Zealand, remember), before asking if there is a name for headlines that can be read more than one way.
Indeed there is. If you’re a linguist, what’s happening is called syntactic ambiguity. But a far more memorable term is “crash blossom”, coined in 2009.
The name derives from a headline in Japan: “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms”. The article was about a violinist whose career took off after his father died in a Japan Airlines crash. But of course that’s not the only way to read the headline, which led some readers to wonder what crash blossoms are and what they have to do with their national airline.
News channels are especially susceptible to such ambiguities, thanks mainly to space constraints and rushed deadlines. The headline about the man in court was later clarified, after its subeditor had presumably found time to see the error of his ways, to “Man In Court After Being Shot By Police”.
While crash blossoms can provide great amusement for callous readers, they’re an inevitable part of being a subeditor. I say that as one who once wrote, proofread, then proofread again a major headline in a monthly magazine which, when the issue arrived hot off the press, proved to be not merely ambiguous but completely nonsensical.
Let me tell you, knowing that your carelessness is now on full view to thousands of readers who are even more cold-hearted than you is humbling, to say the least.
Here’s the thing, which we’ve all experienced I’m sure: When you write something in a hurry and then hurriedly check it, you’re inclined to read only what you thought you wrote, as opposed to what you actually wrote. Subsequent proofreading may have you wander down the same garden path, as though your eyes and brain have lost the ability to read anything other than what’s already in your imagination.
That’s one reason careful writers - and magazine editors who aren’t complete idiots - always have someone else proofread their important work.
Rather than blame murky headlines for crash blossoms, another view is that the brain machinery that does the interpreting is, in the words of linguist Steven Pinker, “quick and thorough but not very bright; it retrieves nonsensical entries that must be weeded out later”.
I imagine that Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman would agree. In his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman posited two thinking systems that drive human behaviour. System 1 is fast, automatic and largely unconscious. It’s what operates when you hear a loud bang and move with an alacrity which - if you are like me - may belie your decrepit and lumbering form. System 2, which is deliberate and effortful, allows you to identify the likely source of the sound, which can be useful when deciding whether to relax or start running.
System 1 is part of the reason you’re here at all. Some time in the distant past, one of your ancestors heard a cracking noise behind them and leapt instantly into the nearest tree, thus avoiding becoming lunch for a hungry lion while enabling the future production of the gamete that led to the marvellous specimen that is you.
But because humans are a lazy lot, we’re inclined to apply System 1 when the more demanding System 2 is more appropriate. Here’s an example: When a group of people were asked whether they would opt for surgery with a survival rate of 90 percent, and another group was asked if they would opt for surgery with a mortality rate of 10 percent, more people said “yes” to the first scenario, even though it’s identical to the second.
They responded automatically to the words “survival” and “mortality”, rather than doing the harder work of considering the statements in their entirety.
If you think you’re above such flawed thinking, think again, Einstein. Kahneman compellingly demonstrates that even highly educated people make basic errors like this. If you’d like to test this for yourself, I recommend this Wikipedia page describing the famous “Linda problem”. Even better, read the book.
Something similar to what Kahneman describes may happen with crash blossoms. Upon seeing a headline, our brain automatically seeks the easiest interpretation, which may not be the one that makes the most sense in the real world. So it’s you who is the idiot, not me, the editor.
Anyway, enough amateur psychology and shifting the blame. Crash blossoms are surely meant to be enjoyed, not dissected. So feast your eyes on these other real life doozies:
Girl Hit By Car Stable
Woman Tied to Gun Used to Kill Colo. Prisons Chief
Milk Drinkers Turn to Powder
Dr Tackett Gives Talk on Moon
Orthodox Jew Flies In Plane Covered In Huge Plastic Bag
And this disturbing eructation from within a news story: “No one was injured in the blast, which was attributed to the build up of gas by one town official.”
Bits and specious
More and more people in Ireland are saying “mom” instead of the quintessentially Irish “mam” or nearly as common “mum”. Is this another example of American English taking over the world? Don’t be an eejit, says language writer Stan Carey (an Irishman himself). It’s just language doing what language does.
Godwin’s Law, created in 1990, states that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Although widely known for his political views, Noam Chomsky’s original, and still primary, claim to fame is as one of the world’s foremost linguists. In the 1970s, a team at Columbia University ran an experiment to see if a chimpanzee could be taught language. If successful, they would have refuted Chomsky’s theory that language is inherent only in humans. The name they gave their subject? Nim Chimpsky.
Catch-22 wasn’t always called Catch-22. Joseph Heller originally planned to call it Catch-18, and published the first chapter under that name in Issue 7 of New World Writing. But shortly before publication of the book itself, Leon Uris’s blockbuster novel Mila 18 was released. Heller then chose Catch-22 for no other reason than that it sounded good.
Publishing company Simon and Schuster paid Heller a $750 advance for the novel and promised a further $750 when the full manuscript was delivered. It sold 10 million copies in the US alone and made Heller a millionaire.
Quote of the week
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.
Mark Twain