“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 to be in any danger after they hit teenage girls. It is the person who was hit that we worry about.

Many websites and news agencies, including MSNBC‘s newsvine.com (“Get Smarter Here”) and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Seattle Times, reprinted the headline without seeming to notice the bizarre parallel world it conjured up.

How did so many people read, edit and arrange this and fail to notice its absurdity? A few outlets, to their credit, changed the headline (“Girl hit by Sound Transit train, survives”; “Teenage girl survives being hit by Sound Transit train”; “King County: Teen girl survives after being hit by Sound Transit train”):

KXLY.com added the relative pronoun who. This was a simple and effective strategy but it made the headlinese seem uncharacteristically like coherent prose:

Browsing the news websites that reported the event, I saw all sorts of variations on the theme, but a remarkable number retained the silly original. Accidental anthropomorphism for the win!

Language Log, meanwhile, has been hosting an interesting discussion on precisely what constitutes a crash blossom, and I’ve written about a few more of them here.

[Hat tip to Michael Quinion.]

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 the strange headline (which is of a type known as a crash blossom). For example:

I must know, where did that robber find a kitchen knife gun?!

Was Groucho Marx involved in the creation of this headline?

I had to join up just to comment on the headline. […] Please tell me where I can find one of these weapons! Where is your editor?

The headline was soon fixed:

Judging by the figures in the right-hand column, this made the locals more amused, bored, and sad; and less furious, thrilled, and intrigued. I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

[more crash blossoms here, there, and elsewhere]

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 academia when it lasts longer:

Where to begin with such a headline? For starters, it’s cynical, sloppy, and daft. It’s a barely significant generalisation dressed up as a salient fact. Ambiguity compounds its wrongness: it’s supposed to mean that (some) fat men have longer lasting sex, but the Telegraph‘s use of enjoy suggests that they might not enjoy it if it didn’t last as long.

And have or enjoy what? This too is open to misinterpretation. Summarising the research in lucid headlinese requires rearranging the above (e.g., “Scientific research shows…”) or placing a comma after sex and an s at the end of show. Without them the headline is made sillier still, because it changes the object from longer lasting sex to longer lasting sex scientific research show.

The last three words are probably intended to stress the article’s pseudo-respectability. There are fewer pretensions at the Weekly World News, which offers the snappier but equally inane “Study: Fat Men Better In Bed”. Granted, the apparent source of this ‘news’ has a much duller title and conclusion, and it appears in a journal few men would read in public, but at least it doesn’t insult our intelligence and our grasp of elementary syntax..

[more crash blossoms]

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, commonly used in headlines to indicate futurity (as in the example above), here inadvertently generates an alternative meaning in which the Dutch TV presenters ate human flesh in order to escape prosecution.

It’s a wild idea.

The headline is unlikely to be misunderstood, but it has the potential to cause a momentary miscue — replacing to with will would avoid it — and it is grammatically interesting.

There are more crash blossoms here, at Language Log (including the recent gem “Does Donald Trump support matter?”), and on the Crash Blossoms blog.

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 appear in headlines and subheadings. Some indicate reported speech or text, a common function of quotation marks; others paraphrase. They are a subset of claim quotes, an unofficial journalistic term for what Martyn Cornell describes as

a shorthand way of saying “someone is making this claim and we neither give it authority nor dismiss it, we’re just reporting it”. Frequently what is inside these sorts of claim quotes is a paraphrase of what was actually said, to make it fit inside the headline space

Bombers, memory holes, vomiting and screaming: the defining feature of scary quotes is that their contents are scary. Visit BBC news any day, at any hour, and you might take fright. [Edit: On a visit an hour later, I saw 'rape', 'recession', and 'rhino gang' in scary quotes – and that's just the Rs, on the front page.]

Yes, I’m plagiarising my Twitter self again. It’s a busy week.

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Previously in novel punctuation: apostrophantoms.

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 Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown ‘sorry’”, are almost parse-proof.

There are also noun compounds that don’t grow to great length, but still manage to be obscure unless you’re already following the story they relate to. Today’s BBC News website contains the following headline:

We can infer the probable, general meaning of “blast boy” from the headline, since blast is common shorthand for explosion (it can also mean criticise or criticism). But anyone unfamiliar with the narrative background will at best have only a vague idea of what’s being reported: we lack the necessary shared context until we read on.

“Blast boy” is what Arnold Zwicky calls a distant compound. These are noun-noun compounds “that can only be correctly understood by someone who can fill in the story that connects the referents of the two nouns”. The sense of distance comes from the

distant real-world relationships between the referents of the modifier and the head, requiring considerable background knowledge for the reader to interpret them.

This is what’s going on with “hurricane money” (see first Zwicky link); “nude pic row vicar”, analysed at Headsup; and “pumpkin bus”, Pamela Downing’s marvellous example of the phenomenon – though she calls them deictic compounds: “novel compounds created to satisfy a fleeting discourse need”.*

On Language Log a few years ago, Geoffrey Pullum used the headline phrase “canoe wife” to discuss the “unnatural semantic relations” of these striking constructions:

It looks to me like a noun-noun compound N₁ N₂ can be formed given just about any relation between N₁-type things and N₂-type things that turns out to be a relevant one for the description of some situation.

Other examples I’ve noticed include “missile woman”, “shark widow”, “polar bear scientist”, and “Smuggle plot tomatoes” (hat tip to Lynne Murphy); in each case the nouns have a very different semantic relationship. Distant compounds are quite common in news headlines, perhaps especially in the UK. Have you spotted them in the wild?

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* Downing’s paper is at JSTOR for those of you with access. Her term deictic compound may be fine for linguists, but for everyday use I think Zwicky’s coinage distant compound has obvious advantages.

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: Girl found alive in France murders car.

Revenge for ‘The Cars That Ate Paris’, perhaps?

[Full story here. It's not pleasant.]

The ambiguity hinges on the phrase murders car, which suggests a surreal and impossible crime (a girl murders a car) but really constitutes part of an unusual compound noun, France murders car: a car implicated in murders in France. In which a girl was found alive.

France murders car also qualifies as a distant compound, like blast boy, canoe wife and pumpkin bus – multiple-noun compounds intelligible only to readers familiar with the relationship between the nouns, or who can guess at the story behind them.

The BBC report itself contains another syntactic ambiguity:

The girl found away from the car – thought to be seven or eight years old – was shot three times and seriously injured, and the younger daughter – only four – hid beneath her mother and was not even found until midnight, our correspondent says.

Though it quickly becomes clear from the context that seven or eight years old refers to a girl and not the car, this could have been signalled more clearly – by inserting she is inside the first pair of dashes, for example.

Nor is this the first time a headline has conferred life on a transportation vehicle: a couple of years ago I wrote about the strange implications of “Sound Transit train hits teenage girl, survives”.

[Hat-tip to @mrdarnley.]

Update:

Fev at headsup suggests a simple change that would avoid the crash blossom: “Girl found alive in France murder car”.

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 than previously believed, or than scientists/anyone previously thought, or just than thought – but that’s the general structure, and it. is. ubiquitous.

Search for site:sciencedaily.com “previously thought” on Google, or try other news websites in the site: slot, and you’ll see what a journalistic crutch it is. I remember grumbling about it on Twitter once and then seeing it in the next two articles I read.

I’ve also mentioned it on this blog, in a comment a few years ago, where I described it as a meaningless and hackneyed device that may be meant to add novelty and excitement to a story, but doesn’t; instead, it implies that no scientist has any imagination whatsoever.

The number of times I’ve read than previously thought and thought, Actually, that’s not a surprise at all, or No, I’ve had that very thought before – well, it’s probably even more than previously thought.

But there is an upside. In its most elliptical form, than thought, it can generate amusing semantic ambiguities, as in this recent example from Discovery News (via @brandalisms): “Death Happens More Slowly Than Thought”, to which one might reasonably reply: It depends on the thought. (Cf. “Human genome far more active than thought”.)

Yes, it’s a crash blossom (i.e., a headline with garden-path ambiguity), a mild one, but the first I’ve written about in a while. I guess the lesson is: When life hands you clichés, make crash blossoms (or other linguistic fun). Not always possible, of course, but maybe more often than prev—

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 search online with various headline-friendly verbs shows it to be a regular enough occurrence:

The plain-language advocate Ernest Gowers, in his revision of Fowler’s, wrote that it would be “unreasonable to criticize headlines for not conforming to literary standards, or even for lacking any grammatical structure”.

I don’t think headlines ever completely forgo grammatical structure, though their structure is often more elliptical than what we find in standard writing.

It’s not as though there was no room for he, it, or whatever pronoun might apply between the two verbs in each case here. But headlines have a sublanguage all their own (sometimes called headlinese), and its rules are dictated by convention as much as necessity.

For more on headline language, including crash blossoms, noun pileups and assorted ambiguities, see the headlines archive.

*[click to enlarge]

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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 notice to date, before realising it was probably supposed to be impart. The article supports this analysis.

To impart is to pass on or transmit, to communicate or disclose, to bestow. One often imparts wisdom. To depart is to leave: a train departs a station. Depart from can mean deviate from (a normal or recommended course of action): the headline departs from intelligibility.

John McIntyre, in The Old Editor Says, warns that errors lurk in the big type and imparts the following wisdom: “Always give the big type a second or third look before publication.” Be on guard, too, for departing wisdom when parting wisdom is meant.

Google returns a few examples of “departs wisdom”, each seemingly intended to mean imparts wisdom, but none so prominent as this. I expect it will crop up again sooner or later.

[Hat-tip to Ultan Cronin for the link. For more like this, see my archive of posts about headlines.]

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 that a crawling, invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’. Headlines often forgo the existential there (‘dummy pronoun’) and its attendant verb is or are, the relative pronoun that, and the indefinite article a. But omitting all of them in this context generates ambiguities.

The adjective crawling can be reanalysed as a verb inflected for progressive tense: Fears [are] crawling. Maybe fears are crawling [that an] invasive fish could create a major disaster.

Or crawling could be read as a gerund, with Australia the grammatical subject that fears it: Australia fears crawling. This possibility should be precluded by the slash, the colour change, and the capital f in fears, but someone glancing at it absent-mindedly could take a step down that garden path. One person I showed it to read it as: Australia fears [that a] crawling, invasive fish could create a major disaster.

The clause invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’ is independent, which may reinforce an instinctive misreading: the comma then serves to splice the two parts of the headline instead of being analysed as a listing comma. (Cf. Man shot in chest, leg knocks on door for help.)

The headline on the story itself is straightforward:

You might notice that the article has an example of hypercorrect fewer (‘fewer than 10km south of the PNG mainland’), but I’ll leave discussion of that for a future post – even if fears are crawling that I’ll never get around to it.

I had no difficulty parsing the crash blossom Fears crawling, invasive fish… But it did strike me as quite opaque, and I paused to review my initial reading and see if there were plausible alternatives. How does it seem to you? Did you have any trouble interpreting it?

Update:

The headline for this BBC story was originally ‘Alps crash remains land in Germany’, with remains a particular source of ambiguity. It was soon revised to: ‘Germanwings crash: Victims’ remains land in Duesseldorf’.

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 that a crawling, invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’. Headlines often forgo the existential there (‘dummy pronoun’) and its attendant verb is or are, the relative pronoun that, and the indefinite article a. But omitting all of them in this context generates ambiguities.

The adjective crawling can be reanalysed as a verb inflected for progressive tense: Fears [are] crawling. Maybe fears are crawling [that an] invasive fish could create a major disaster.

Or crawling could be read as a gerund, with Australia the grammatical subject that fears it: Australia fears crawling. This possibility should be precluded by the slash, the colour change, and the capital f in fears, but someone glancing at it absent-mindedly could take a step down that garden path. One person I showed it to read it as: Australia fears [that a] crawling, invasive fish could create a major disaster.

The clause invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’ is independent, which may reinforce an instinctive misreading: the comma then serves to splice the two parts of the headline instead of being analysed as a listing comma. (Cf. Man shot in chest, leg knocks on door for help.)

The headline on the story itself is straightforward:

You might notice that the article has an example of hypercorrect fewer (‘fewer than 10km south of the PNG mainland’), but I’ll leave discussion of that for a future post – even if fears are crawling that I’ll never get around to it.

I had no difficulty parsing the crash blossom Fears crawling, invasive fish… But it did strike me as quite opaque, and I paused to review my initial reading and see if there were plausible alternatives. How does it seem to you? Did you have any trouble interpreting it?

Update:

The headline for this BBC story was originally ‘Alps crash remains land in Germany’, with remains a particular source of ambiguity. It was soon revised to: ‘Germanwings crash: Victims’ remains land in Duesseldorf’.

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 that a crawling, invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’. Headlines often forgo the existential there (‘dummy pronoun’) and its attendant verb is or are, the relative pronoun that, and the indefinite article a. But omitting all of them in this context generates ambiguities.

The adjective crawling can be reanalysed as a verb inflected for progressive tense: Fears [are] crawling. Maybe fears are crawling [that an] invasive fish could create a major disaster.

Or crawling could be read as a gerund, with Australia the grammatical subject that fears it: Australia fears crawling. This possibility should be precluded by the slash, the colour change, and the capital f in fears, but someone glancing at it absent-mindedly could take a step down that garden path. One person I showed it to read it as: Australia fears [that a] crawling, invasive fish could create a major disaster.

The clause invasive fish could create a ‘major disaster’ is independent, which may reinforce an instinctive misreading: the comma then serves to splice the two parts of the headline instead of being analysed as a listing comma. (Cf. Man shot in chest, leg knocks on door for help.)

The headline on the story itself is straightforward:

You might notice that the article has an example of hypercorrect fewer (‘fewer than 10km south of the PNG mainland’), but I’ll leave discussion of that for a future post – even if fears are crawling that I’ll never get around to it.

I had no difficulty parsing the crash blossom Fears crawling, invasive fish… But it did strike me as quite opaque, and I paused to review my initial reading and see if there were plausible alternatives. How does it seem to you? Did you have any trouble interpreting it?

Update:

The headline for this BBC story was originally ‘Alps crash remains land in Germany’, with remains a particular source of ambiguity. It was soon revised to: ‘Germanwings crash: Victims’ remains land in Duesseldorf’.

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 non-specialists, pervades professional circles too – journalists, for example, but also journalism professors and authors of writing manuals.

A case in point is Essential English: For Journalists, Editors and Writers by Sir Harold Evans. First published as Newsman’s English in 1972, book one of a five-volume manual of newspaper writing and design, it was fully revised by Crawford Gillan and published by Pimlico in 2000, also incorporating book three, News Headlines (1974).

Essential English first wades into the passive-voice swamp in Chapter 2, in a section titled ‘Be Active’:

‘Police arrested Jones’ – that is a sentence in the active voice. The subject (police) is the actor: the receiver of the action (Jones) is the object. We say the verb (arrested) is being used transitively because it requires an object; the verb is said to be used intransitively when it does not need an object. Look what happens to that perfectly good sentence in the active voice with a transitive verb when we write the sentence in the passive voice – when the receiver of the action becomes the subject rather than the object: ‘Jones was arrested by police’. We now have five words where three told the story before.

Well then, how about Jones was arrested? That’s three words, it keeps the main subject to the fore, and it reduces redundancy: Who else but the police would have arrested him? Whether Police arrested Jones or Jones was arrested is better depends on the surrounding text. There are arguments against the passive voice, in certain contexts, but those presented here are invalidated by a bad example. Not an auspicious start.

The next chapter looks at sources of wordiness. It compares ‘shorter and more direct’ phrasing (Sandy Smith hurt his leg; Lawrence Jones was killed) with what it calls ‘passive reporting’ (Sandy Smith suffered a leg injury; Lawrence Jones was fatally injured). Whatever about the styles’ respective merits, they can’t be distinguished by grammatical voice: Both Smith clauses are active; both Jones clauses are passive. Talk of ‘passive reporting’ is confused and misleading.

Chapter 6 of Essential English has useful analysis of news story structure. But again, when it touches on active versus passive voice, it goes astray. Dissecting an example of a ‘good news narrative’ (a report on Kosovo refugees by Barry Bearak in the NYT, 1999), it praises a passage that begins thus:

This morning, the hoxha did the ritual cleaning of the bodies. The girls’ bloody clothes were replaced by the white sheets.

In a sidebar opposite these lines, we are advised: ‘Note the quality of observation. Concrete nouns, active voice verbs.’ But of the two verb constructions quoted, did and were replaced, one is active and one is passive. One out of two ain’t good. The next few verbs in the report are active, but the damage is done – the impression is of authors and editors, writing about writing, unable to identify the passive voice at the same time that they complain about it.

Essential English focuses on headlines in its last two chapters, giving lots of good advice. Unfortunately, it returns to the topic of active and passive voice and gets it fundamentally wrong again:

Above all, prefer the active voice to the passive. In other words, write headlines with somebody saying something or doing something, rather than having it told to them or done to them. ‘Boy falls into well’ is what people say and what text editors should write as a headline, rather than this published but unnatural back-to-front headline:

FALL INTO WELL
INJURES BOY

Fall into well injures boy (Arizona Republic, 10 December 1957, p. 1) may well be back to front, story-wise, but it’s not passive – it’s active. Fall into well is the subject, and injures is the verb. There’s nothing passive about it. You can’t demonise the passive voice with an example in the active voice. It just makes nonsense of an already simplistic argument.

The headline in the passive voice could be: Boy injured by fall into well. This may not be elegant, but it retains Evans’s preferred front-to-back order, and it includes an important detail (the injury) which is missing from Boy falls into well. And I don’t know about you, but I would never say ‘Boy falls into well’ in ordinary discourse. It’s not ‘what people say’.

The book goes on to note that use of the active voice ‘can lead to a more vivid construction’ in a headline, because by reducing the word count it frees up extra space. That’s true, though it shouldn’t be taken as creed – occasionally passive is still appropriate. But the example used to illustrate the point is poor:

US DEMANDS RELEASE OF SEIZED SHIP

RELEASE OF SEIZED SHIP DEMANDED BY US

The second headline is indeed passive – at last! – but it seems to be a contrived case. US demands release of seized ship is a real, historical headline, but I found no evidence of the passive formulation, so I’m guessing Evans converted it to make his point. This is unsatisfactory and unconvincing, since I can’t imagine many sub-editors approving it.

Given the book’s theme and the experience of those involved in its publication, you’d think someone would have noticed the problem it has in identifying the passive voice – whatever about the bias in how it’s characterised. You would hope the author, editor, proofreader or fact-checker would have addressed it. For a book offering expert guidance on English prose, it’s utterly inept on this point.

Inept, but not unusual:

These are just a few examples I came across fortuitously. If I went looking, I’d find a lot more. Language Log has catalogued many other cases over the years.

Essential English has a stellar reputation, as shown by its back-cover blurbs. Across the political spectrum, it’s lauded by editing luminaries as a ‘bible’, ‘the standard and brilliant text on written English for journalism’, and so on. In many ways it is a helpful manual. But I wonder how influential its grammatical ignorance has been. If this is a bible for journos, it’s no wonder they’re confused about passives.

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[My earlier post ‘Fear and loathing of the passive voice’ has a great set of videos that explain what the passive voice is, what it isn’t, and why so many people use it as a scapegoat for various types of writing they don’t like. If you’re not 100% sure of the terrain, I recommend it. NB: I edited this post after publication to structure it better.]

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 therefore liable to cause confusion, if this exchange is any indication.

On foot of means ‘because of’, ‘as a result of’, or ‘on the basis of’. T.P. Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English offers the example sentences ‘On foot of this, we can’t go any further with this deal’ and ‘On foot of the charges, he had to appear in the court’.

These lines suggest it’s a formal phrase, and that’s invariably how I see it used; I’ve yet to hear it in everyday conversation. A search on Google News shows that it’s common in crime reporting in Ireland. I also see it in academic and business prose, an impression confirmed by the example sentences in Oxford Dictionaries, e.g.:

Further decisions could be taken on foot of that, he said.

It was on foot of one of these monthly reviews that the decision to close the nursery was taken in August.

A spokesperson for the site said they were very disappointed that on foot of legal advice they had to shut the service down.

A search for the phrase on IrishTimes.com or IrishExaminer.com returns thousands of hits, including in headlines. Here’s a couple:

By contrast, a search for on foot of on the TheGuardian.com returns just 146 hits, many of them false positives (‘a journey on foot of 26 miles’) or quoting Irish sources.

The OED labels the usage Irish English and stresses its jurisprudential use, defining it as: ‘consequent and in conformance to (a legal judgment, decision, etc.); on the basis of’. It dates it to 1818 and says the phrase derives from foot in the sense footing, as in on an equal footing.

On foot of all that, I need say no more about it.

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 the syntactic rug-pull. Everything seems fine and straightforward until that last word, restart, which turns out to be the predicate, forcing the reader to re-evaluate what they’ve just read. The sense is so obscured that it may take a few attempts.

The story itself has a far more intelligible headline: ‘Oxford University resumes Covid-19 vaccine trials’. Cached versions on the Wayback Machine suggest that that’s also how it was originally published – the confusing headline appears only on main pages.

Recently I showed how omitting the relative pronoun that can lead readers up the garden path. It’s especially likely in headlines because of their telegraphic style. This one omits that and also were and a:

Vaccine trials [that were] halted after [a] patient fell ill restart

Dropping that were creates a reduced relative clause, forming the same structure as the classic garden-path sentence ‘The horse raced past the barn fell’ (‘The horse [that was] raced past the barn fell’).

If spatial limits or convention prevented the inclusion of that were, the relative clause could have been favourably set off with commas:

Vaccine trials, halted after patient fell ill, restart

Or, even less conventionally and elegantly, with parentheses or dashes. Or some detail other than the trials’ interruption could have been used that would avoid obvious pitfalls of comprehension.

In editorial and linguistic circles there’s a special name for garden-path constructions in headlines: crash blossoms. The term comes from the 2009 example ‘Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms’.

Did this one confound you as it did me?

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 with trivial differences at the US’s ABC News, India’s Business Standard, Singapore’s Straits Times, and others.

The problem is the main clause:

Unlikely monkeypox outbreak will lead to pandemic

The intended reading, expanded from headlinese, is:

It is unlikely that the monkeypox outbreak will lead to a pandemic

But it’s also possible, and not a huge stretch, to completely misinterpret it as:

The unlikely monkeypox outbreak will lead to a pandemic

The monkeypox outbreak is not wildly unlikely, because of spillover infections resulting from increasing human encroachment on wild habitats (if you’ll permit the oversimplification). But it caught a lot of people in the West off guard, because the disease is normally restricted to parts of the African continent.

So it’s fair to say that the outbreak seemed unlikely to many people when they first heard about it (even if it also seemed morbidly fitting in the current ecological climate). ‘Unlikely monkeypox outbreak’ is therefore a perfectly conceivable noun phrase, with unlikely modifying monkeypox outbreak rather than a full clause. The result is well-formed, meaningful, plausible, and utterly misleading.

The full implied clause, as I’ve noted above, is:

It is unlikely that the monkeypox outbreak will lead to a pandemic

But only the word that is needed to quash the ambiguity:

Unlikely that monkeypox outbreak will lead to pandemic

Reordering is another option, albeit less felicitous:

Monkeypox outbreak unlikely to lead to pandemic

Journalists love to omit that whenever they can, not least in headlines. But sometimes they really shouldn’t – even if the ensuing crash blossoms* generate fun for editors, critics, and linguists.

As I said of another ill-advised omission of that in 2020, in a corrective to Strunk and White’s peevish parsimony, it’s unwise to omit words if you lack the judgement to know which words are truly needless.

[hat-tip to Elisa Gabbert on Twitter]

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* A crash blossom is a news headline with garden-path ambiguity. The one in this post likely won’t wrong-foot very many people – compare the last crash blossom I wrote about: ‘Vaccine trials halted after patient fell ill restart’. But it’s still ambiguous, and easily avoided.