2018-08-15 Current Events: headlines, crash blossoms

Greg Malivuk
[email protected]
http://www.pastebin.com/u/gmalivuk - notes from all classes
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Homework: handout Activity 4 - “translate” the headlines into correct spoken English sentences
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The stock market is crashing. / The stock market has (recently) crashed.
The U.S. population is moving west.
A/The new budget has been termed [called / described as] a “disaster”.
The U.S. is going to protest nuclear testing.
The president is going to visit China.
The drought is expected to worsen. (This is probably about an existing drought, not in general.)
There is / has been a big white house shake-up.
There is a new plan to improve bus services. / A new plan is going to improve bus services.
	(The first interpretation is more probable, because the second implies that the writer is certain that the plan will improve services.)
Test scores are improving in public schools. / have been improving
A link has been found between diet and heart disease.
Cancer is reported to be increasing.
There is / has been a major decrease in international students in the U.S.
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Ambiguity - Because many words are left out of headlines, it’s easier for them to be ambiguous than for spoken sentences.
But normal sentences can also be ambiguous: A stolen painting was found by a tree.
(The headline version, “Stolen Painting Found by Tree”, doesn’t affect the ambiguity, because the word “by” is what makes it ambiguous.)
http://www.fun-with-words.com/ambiguous_headlines.html - Many “funny” ambiguous headlines
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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=118 - “Crash blossoms”, a type of ambiguous headline
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1693 - original post about the phenomenon
“Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms”
- At first, you try to think of what kind of flower has crash blossoms on it.
- If you know that JAL is an airline, you might realize that the article is about a violinist who was linked to a JAL plane crash. “Blossoms” is the verb, and it means something like “matures and thrives”.
(The story is about a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.)
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25878202 - example of a confusing noun pile in a headline: “Citizen science charts horse chestnut tree pest spread”
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http://www.allgeneralizationsarefalse.com/the-chart-version-3-0-what-exactly-are-we-reading/ - General description of bias and quality in many news sources (particularly for political news).