04 May 2014

Beware of deputies with schizophrenia


There's a term for this type of grammatical awkwardness, but I can't think of it.  Not an eggcorn.  Someone may know.

Addendum: Someone always does, at this blog.  A hat tip to Dumpsterkitty for identifying it as a "crash blossom" - which I have blogged before.  Not once (LOL example).  Not twice.  But three times (a huge list of examples).

Someday I'll learn the term.  Until then I'll rely on my readers...

8 comments:

  1. Amphiboly or amphibology. perhaps?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

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    Replies
    1. From which I learn of the lack of a copula -

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula

      Thank you!

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    2. Interesting! I don't know if this qualifies as a zero copula or not, but when I moved from Georgia to Kentucky, there was only one language shift that I immediately noted as weird: folks around here tend to leave out "to be" in certain sentences where I would expect it. For example, on looking at an untidy yard, I would say, "That grass needs to be mowed." But everyone around here just says, "That grass needs mowed." I've lived here for seven years and it still sounds strange to me.

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    3. Headlines gone awry are known as crash blossoms. There's a whole category of them at Language Log...

      http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=118

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  2. @Anonymous, they talk that way in Pittsburgh as well. When my youngest moved there, she said she hadn't realized she would need to relearn English.

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  3. Far too common. Not the crash blossoms, the deputies.

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  4. Is this technically a crash blossom? I thought the key property was that it had to have two valid interpretations, translations from headline-ese to normal English. I can only come up with one: "The man who was killed after attacking deputies had schizophrenia." It could be considered a 'garden path' sentence in headline-ese. That would be correspond to the reading "A man was killed after attacking deputies..." of the beginning. Is that what everyone is reacting to?

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    Replies
    1. As a crash blossom, the two interpretations would be a) that the man had schizophrenia, and b) that the deputies attacking the man were the ones who had schizophrenia.

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