Confusing headlines

[bradrn]

Hm, I've got the impression that "dead cat bounce" has been used for quite a while for "a period when numbers that have been going down for a while, such as economic indicators or politicians' poll numbers, temporarily go up, before going back to their previous downwards slide".

Really? I’ve never heard of it, and I thought it sounded remarkably strange when I saw it.

[Raphael]

Unrelated to that, here's not a headline, but a potentially confusing quote from a book. Specifically, from The Fifties by David Halberstam. It's from a part about Senator Kefauver's committee hearings into organized crime:

For the Kefauver hearings contained innately explosive drama. There, live and in black and white, were the bad guys on one side, looking very much like hoods, showing by the way they spoke and in other ways they never quite realized that they were part of the underworld[...]

Clearly, Halberstam intended it to be read as

There, live and in black and white, were the bad guys on one side, looking very much like hoods, [showing by the way they spoke and [in other ways they never quite realized]] [that they were part of the underworld]

but a reader could be forgiven for interpreting it as

There, live and in black and white, were the bad guys on one side, looking very much like hoods, [showing by the way they spoke and in other ways] [[they never quite realized] [that they were part of the underworld]]

[bradrn]

China tortured detained British diplomat, says UK government

(Don’t you just love sequences of ‘verbs’?)

[KathTheDragon]

What's the problem with this one?

[bradrn]

What's the problem with this one?

It isn’t actually ambiguous in any way, but I found it a bit garden-pathy when I first saw it: the first few words look almost like China-tortured detained British diplomat (with a missing hyphen), but the rest of the sentence doesn’t match up with that parse.

EDIT: Just checked the news and ran into this same headline again without expecting it; this time I ended up parsing it with detained as a verb, and then hastily backtracked when I realised I’d went down the garden path again. Really, it’s just a confusing sentence.

[Travis B.]

This one seems pretty normal to me; the correct interpretation is much easier for me to come to than the incorrect one.

[Linguoboy]

Human remains confirmed to be missing Idaho kids Joshua Vallow and Tylee Ryan (NBC)

[elemtilas]

Human remains confirmed to be missing Idaho kids Joshua Vallow and Tylee Ryan (NBC)

Curious: what's confusing with this one? "Human remains" are plural; "kids" are plural and obviously non-haedine; two kids are named.

[Travis B.]

Human remains confirmed to be missing Idaho kids Joshua Vallow and Tylee Ryan (NBC)

Curious: what's confusing with this one? "Human remains" are plural; "kids" are plural and obviously non-haedine; two kids are named.

The other reading is that the human remains are missing something, and that something are the Idaho kids Joshua Vallow and Tylee Ryan.

[Raphael]

Ah, now I get it.

[Linguoboy]

Human remains confirmed to be missing Idaho kids Joshua Vallow and Tylee Ryan (NBC)

Curious: what's confusing with this one? "Human remains" are plural; "kids" are plural and obviously non-haedine; two kids are named.

The other reading is that the human remains are missing something, and that something are the Idaho kids Joshua Vallow and Tylee Ryan.

That actually wasn’t even a reading I thought of. I got garden-pathed by parsing “human” as the subject of the verb “remains” and then slammed into the names of the two children.

[Raphael]

By the way, what exactly did the term "garden path" in the title of earlier versions of this thread refer to?

[elemtilas]

By the way, what exactly did the term "garden path" in the title of earlier versions of this thread refer to?

It's an idiom meaning to lead someone astray. WP article.

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[bradrn]

Dame Vera Lynn, World War II forces sweetheart, dies at age 103

[Linguoboy]

Not a headline, but a particularly awkward sentence in a news article: “Preet Bharara, whom Berman replaced after being fired by Trump, in a tweet asked, "Why does a president get rid of his own hand-picked US Attorney in SDNY on a Friday night, less than 5 months before the election?"”

[Qwynegold]

Another non-headline. This one is from Swedish text-TV:

1986 hade Engström ("Skandiamannen") blivit anhållen som skäligen misstänkt för mordet på Palme, enligt Petersson.
1986 have-PST Engström (Skandia-man.DEF) become.SUP arrested as reasonably suspected for muder.DEF on Palme, according.to Petersson
In 1986 Engström ("the Skandia man") had been arrested for the murder of Palme by probable cause, according to Petersson.

What's confusing here is whether that's a "hypothetical had", or whether it's actual. I'm pretty sure the person was never arrested.

[Linguoboy]

Florida ends drinking at bars, shatters record spike in new coronavirus cases (CNBC)

Feels like they mashed together two different headline ideas.

[Pabappa]

John Cena surprises 7-year-old boy with cancer on his birthday --- Winnipeg Sun

“This was truly the most amazing gift my son could have had," said the boy's mother.

[Linguoboy]

I guess celebrity news takes a while to reach Winnipeg?