Confusing headlines

[Moose-tache]

Are you similarly confused by "road accident"?

I know we're just having a bit of fun here, but I'll bite. Yes, if someone died of thyroid cancer or meteroid strike or chest-bursting alien while they happened to be standing near a road, and the newspaper reported it as a "roadaccident," I could be a little confused by their choice of words. Also, you cheated by making it two words. The whole point is that it's a compound word. "opera collapse" is obviously fine. It's "operacollapse" that implies the two nouns have some kind of relationship to one another.

[Travis B.]

Are you similarly confused by "road accident"?

I know we're just having a bit of fun here, but I'll bite. Yes, if someone died of thyroid cancer or meteroid strike or chest-bursting alien while they happened to be standing near a road, and the newspaper reported it as a "roadaccident," I could be a little confused by their choice of words. Also, you cheated by making it two words. The whole point is that it's a compound word. "opera collapse" is obviously fine. It's "operacollapse" that implies the two nouns have some kind of relationship to one another.

I would personally translate operakollaps, based on my very limited knowledge of Swedish, to English as opera collapse, with a space, and I would intuitively read opera collapse in English as meaning the collapse of an opera house. So to say that a conductor "died in an opera collapse" to me would indicate that he died when an opera house collapsed on him.

[zompist]

Are you similarly confused by "road accident"?

I know we're just having a bit of fun here, but I'll bite. Yes, if someone died of thyroid cancer or meteroid strike or chest-bursting alien while they happened to be standing near a road, and the newspaper reported it as a "roadaccident," I could be a little confused by their choice of words. Also, you cheated by making it two words. The whole point is that it's a compound word. "opera collapse" is obviously fine. It's "operacollapse" that implies the two nouns have some kind of relationship to one another.

Brad already addressed this: whether you have a space or not is mostly a matter of orthography. It's not entirely arbitrary, but it does tend to correlate with how long the compound has existed. Plus the citation was in Swedish, and two minutes looking at a Swedish dictionary should show you that Swedish usually dispenses with the space where English doesn't.

Also, maybe let's not pretend, on page 29 of this thread, that headlinese doesn't exist. Yes, in an academic work you'd write about "bodily collapses colocated with opera productions" or something, but in a headline, the guy suffered an opera collapse.

[Moose-tache]

whether you have a space or not is mostly a matter of orthography.

This seems like to-order sophistry. Why does Swedish not write the sentence as Dirigentdogioperakollaps, if it "despenses with" the arbitrary Anglophonic silliness that is word spacing?

And as for the "if you'd look at Swedish for two minutes, you'd see they do this all the time," nonsense... I did look for two minutes and see that Swedish treats this sort of compound as totally normal. That's the problem! They are incorrect to do so and should stop.

[bradrn]

whether you have a space or not is mostly a matter of orthography.

This seems like to-order sophistry. Why does Swedish not write the sentence as Dirigentdogioperakollaps, if it "despenses with" the arbitrary Anglophonic silliness that is word spacing?

Because that’s not how the orthography works. ‘Mostly a matter of orthography’ does not mean ‘meaningless’; it just means the spacing has no particular implication for the analysis of phonology, syntax or semantics.

For further examples, I present this post:

Here’s an amusing example of orthographic weirdness I found recently (source: Julien’s Syntactic Heads and Word Formation). Here are two sentences in two very closely related languages. From Jicaltepec Mixtec:

ča

T

ní

ASP

čákuda

sit.down

rá

he

He has already sat down.

And from Chalcatongo Mixtec:

a-ni-ndatu

T-COMPL-wait-I

uù

two

órá

hour

I’ve already been waiting for two hours.

Note that the authors seemingly could not make up their minds about whether the tense and aspect morphemes are particles or prefixes.

…

I should probably also mention Setswana and relatives, a group of Bantu languages where spaces are placed between morphemes rather than words, which makes them look like isolating languages: Go tloga kgale le kgale ntse go na le ditlhopho mo nageng e. (Compare a sentence from the same article in SiSwati: IRiphabhulikhi yaseNingizimu Afrika (INingizimu Afrika), live lelitfolaka entansi neningizimu kwesichingikati se Afrika.)

[zompist]

whether you have a space or not is mostly a matter of orthography.

This seems like to-order sophistry. Why does Swedish not write the sentence as Dirigentdogioperakollaps, if it "despenses with" the arbitrary Anglophonic silliness that is word spacing?

Are you trolling for funsies at this point? Do you need to review the day in Ling 101 when they point out that not all languages are written and they are still languages? Languages differ in spacing conventions. It's kind of... not as clever as you may think to make fun of other languages because they're not English.

[Qwynegold]

So in Swedish, you can create compound words that are only connected adverbially? Operakollaps can equally mean "the collapse of an opera" or "an unrelated collapse during an opera?"

I haven't been studying Swedish word creation enough to be able to answer that properly, but I believe that that weird sense of "operakollaps" is possible, though very, very unusual.

simningsmärta: "an unrelated toothache that occurs while one happens to be swimming"
lågkonjunkturbankrutt: "coincidentally running out of money because one bought too many scented candles, but also there's a recession happening"

That is absolutely wild and should not be allowed.

Lol, it's hard to tell if those examples would be possible. I'd need to see them in authentic use. But I'll try to keep an eye out to see if I can spot other compounds of this type in the wild.

[Qwynegold]

Anyhow, I think in this situation the flaw does not lay in the language itself, but in the journalist's typing of that sentence. It should be common sense to not use that compound in a headline, because knowledge of the circumstances is necessary to understand the compound, and when reading a headline one does not yet know anything of the circumstances.

[alice]

Over 50s quitting the workforce fuels inflation. What is the "workforce fuels inflation"?

[fusijui]

Over 50s quitting the workforce fuels inflation. What is the "workforce fuels inflation"?

The price of takeaway giga-lattes from Starbucks is rising?

[bradrn]

State gifts to mates dwarf union claims

[zompist]

Not a headline, but a tweet:

girls turn on other girls way too easily

Someone else commented, "My queer ass still can’t read this tweet correctly"

[Travis B.]

Not a headline, but a tweet:

girls turn on other girls way too easily

Someone else commented, "My queer ass still can’t read this tweet correctly"

My immediate reading of this was the queer one, and I'm not queer.

[fusijui]

It's not a queer reading at all, it's the creme de la creme of straight male reading.

[linguistcat]

It's not a queer reading at all, it's the creme de la creme of straight male reading.

No, straight man culture thinks everything women do is for men's benefit or to get their attention, so the idea women felt sexual attraction for each other wouldn't cross their mind. To read it as "women cause other women to be sexually attracted to them very easily" you have to presuppose that women can be sexually attracted to other women, for no reason other than they are. IE, the reading is at least a little queer.

The non-queer reading is that women will backstab each other readily, which is much less fun and more in line with "straight culture".

[Travis B.]

It's not a queer reading at all, it's the creme de la creme of straight male reading.

No, straight man culture thinks everything women do is for men's benefit or to get their attention, so the idea women felt sexual attraction for each other wouldn't cross their mind. To read it as "women cause other women to be sexually attracted to them very easily" you have to presuppose that women can be sexually attracted to other women, for no reason other than they are. IE, the reading is at least a little queer.

The non-queer reading is that women will backstab each other readily, which is much less fun and more in line with "straight culture".

I think fusijui is referring to the idea that "girl on girl is hot" held by many straight men.

[linguistcat]

I think fusijui is referring to the idea that "girl on girl is hot" held by many straight men.

I get that, but that's very different from "Women find other women hot, no men involved."

[fusijui]

Straight males get off on women, regardless of how they identify.

Like you.

[linguistcat]

Straight males get off on women, regardless of how they identify.

What... does that have to do with women finding other women attractive?

[Travis B.]

Straight males get off on women, regardless of how they identify.

What... does that have to do with women finding other women attractive?

Apparently women being anything other than asexual sexualizes them in the eyes of cisgendered heterosexual males, even when their sexuality is directed not at men but at other women... (Isn't this idea rather... repressive, as it implies that women's sexuality ought to be repressed in general, even when it does not involve men?)