In addition to its being, finally, one iffy headline that I won't get yelled at about, it illustrates one of the many problems we face as headline writers: the possibility that nouns will be read as verbs and vice versa. It took me about half a dozen readings before I realized that Abuses was not a subjectless verb but rather a plural noun, making Dog not a noun or a noun adjunct describing Paths but rather a verb. Nobody's abusing any dog paths, but abuses are dogging these crews' paths.
The plausibility of "dog paths" as something that could indeed exist and be written about compounds the "noun or verb?" problem, and even if you get a glimmer of the story's real subject, noun dogs could still conceivably be involved (as a colleague of mine said, "At least it isn't what I feared -- a story about how these salespeople are often attacked by dogs").
The headline isn't helped by the quotation marks, justified as they may be, on "Crews," or by the fleeting appearance that we're talking about a young magazine, not young people making up these "crews." Too many distractions.
I've certainly looked the other way at one or two of these issues when I couldn't think of a better alternative, but a headline can survive only so many potential distractions. (And the Times is consistently excellent at avoiding such problems, which is why this example stood out for me.)
11 comments:
This is a case where grammatical issues truly obscure meaning. I honestly started out thinking it was a case of abuses of or on a dog path. By the time I got to the magazine crews, I was completely buffaloed. (As an aside, the headline was about as easy to parse as the famous "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.") Even after making my way, with your help, through the fact that the dog wasn't canine, I couldn't tell what kind of magazine crew it was. And what those single quotes were doing there (crews' what?). I'll be curious to see if they change it.
And then there's Major Major Major Major.
Bill, you get yelled at?!?
good to know that I'm not the only one to cringe, look twice, read three times and then say hmmm... when I saw this head. I'm using this one in my copoy editing students as a "teaching moment."
I once saw "Ethics charges dog spy." I got off on the wrong part-of-speech foot -- thinking "Ethics" was shorthand for an ethics commission -- and proceeded to read it as noun-verb-adjective-noun. I was left with many questions. What's a dog spy? And what was he charged with?
What's a dog spy? Obviously you're not familiar with the great Teddy Salad.
I assumed it was a reference to "Fang":
http://www.sitcomsonline.com/photopost/data/759/14549getsmart22.jpg
Curious about the dog-as-verb problem, I went poking around and found these shining examples:
Duck dilemma dogs development (Sounds like four nouns.)
Crank calls dog island's president (A crank telephoned the president of dog island?)
Insurance issues dog Curry (An insurance company is distributing big steaming bowls of dog curry?)
Nice!
That's right up there with searching Google News for "pubic education" every once in a while.
Whitehorse recently hosted the Canada Winter Games and many photographs were captioned with Vanier School, Shooting.
Even with the comma, I think that caption is problematic.
The Des Moines Register once used "Town comes together to help widow man, kids." Seemed pretty cruel on first glance.
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