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Unlikely syntax will lead to clarity
This Reuters story about monkeypox, published on 30 May 2022, has an unfortunate ambiguity in its headline: The same headline appeared on sites syndicating the report, like Yahoo! News and Nasdaq, and...
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Headline trials halted
This headline appeared on the front page of the Guardian website last weekend and came to my attention via Mercedes Durham on Twitter: Vaccine trials halted after patient fell ill restart It’s quite...
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On foot of an Irish idiom
In a comment on my post about 12 Irish English usages, Margaret suggested that I write about the Irish expression on foot of. It was a good idea: the phrase is not widely known outside Ireland and is...
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Passive voice peeving and ignorance
Despite all the solid, readily available information on the passive voice, there remains a great deal of misinformation and confusion about it. This confusion, far from being limited to...
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Fears crawling, crash blossoming
This headline on the front page of today’s Guardian caught my eye for reasons both ecological and syntactic. See what you make of it before reading on: In normal prose it might read: There are fears...
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Fears crawling, crash blossoming
This headline on the front page of today’s Guardian caught my eye for reasons both ecological and syntactic. See what you make of it before reading on: In normal prose it might read: There are fears...
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Fears crawling, crash blossoming
This headline on the front page of today’s Guardian caught my eye for reasons both ecological and syntactic. See what you make of it before reading on: In normal prose it might read: There are fears...
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Departing wisdom
*[click to enlarge] * It took me a moment to figure out this headline in today’s Irish Times. I wondered if it might be a novel or obscure sense of depart in sports journalism that had escaped my...
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Readers say find headline syntax weird
A news story at Reuters last week had a striking bit of syntax in its headline: This unorthodox grammatical construction is not unusual in headlines, but I didn’t make a note of it before. A quick...
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More clichéd than previously thought
A lesser known cliché in journalism, especially science reporting, is the construction than previously thought. It doesn’t always take that precise form – sometimes it’s than originally thought, or...
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BBC crash blossom: Girl murders car?
It’s a while since Sentence first featured a crash blossom – those headlines that lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking – so here’s one from the front page of today’s BBC news website:...
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‘Smuggle plot tomatoes’ and other distant compounds
I’ve written before about noun pileups, where nouns pile up to form strange or baffling strings, typically in headlines, such as “Slough sausage choke baby death woman jailed”. Some, like “Ben Douglas...
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‘Scary quotes’
You’ve probably heard of scare quotes, well here’s scary quotes. This is an image from the BBC news website today. Note the scary phrases in quotation marks, aka inverted commas: Scary quotes commonly...
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A grisly crash blossom
What would you do to escape prosecution? Crash blossoms, as you may know, are headlines that can lead you up the garden path, semantically speaking. Today’s Irish Times has a mild one. The word to,...
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The sex scientific research show
Roll up, roll up! Please form an orderly queue for the all-new, all-outrageous Sex Scientific Research Show! According to the Australian Daily Telegraph, fat men enjoy this carnival of degenerate...
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Weapon of choice
NBC Miami published a dramatic story last week about a “botched robbery attempt”. As you can see, the robbery isn’t the only thing that was botched: The story attracted nine comments, all of them about...
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Loco motive
“Sound Transit train hits teenage girl, survives” was the headline to an Associated Press story that did the rounds recently. You might well wonder at it. Trains, after all, are not usually considered...
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