Two headline items, one definitely linguistic, the other entertaining mostly because of the content.
Garden path. From Barbara Partee on the 16th, this garden path construction, about which Barbara said
the fact that it definitely garden pathed me shows that syntactic processing is faster than (at least some kinds of) pragmatic processing: “Neighbor of Ohio girl found dead in trash arrested”.
I got this one right on the first reading, but many readers did not.
Amazing events. Then, from Wonkette today, two heads whose pleasures are mostly from the absurd situations described, though the heads have pleasures of their own:
Trailer Park Superhero: The Methylator: Oregon Meth Binge Generates 2013′s greatest headline:
We don’t just drag this out for any old story. We didn’t think that any story could possibly top the November 2012 headline from Scott Lake, Washington: “Two Alligators, A Pole Dancer And Pot At Olympia Area Shooting Scene”. And yet we knew it was at least theoretically possible, however unlikely.
And now, dear readers, we may finally have a winner — we’ll let you decide. From aggregation site PoliceOne.com, we present the new challenger: “Oregon man on meth fights off 12 cops while masturbating in bar”.
(Note the portmanteau methylator in the headline.)
