Mark Mandel posted to ADS-L yesterday (under the heading “the imparseable dream”) with this baffling headline:
Advocate happy credit-card companies called on the White House carpet
(from the Philadelphia Inquirer of 26 April). Contemplate this for a while, and then I’ll reveal the interpretation “under the fold”.
Once he looked at the story, Mandel saw the light:
It’s a combination of standard headlinese shortcuts, deleting copula, complementizer, auxiliaries, and of course determiner (but not in the idiom “call __ on *the* carpet”): AN advocate IS happy THAT credit-card companies HAVE BEEN called on the White House carpet. The advocate referred to is a consumer advocate.
Language Log has occasional postings on hard-to-parse and ambiguous headlines (compendia here — “The sad task of headline writers” — and here — “Confused? Read on…”).
April 28, 2009 at 10:25 pm |
I actually parsed it correctly after about 2 seconds… Read enough headlines and it gets easier.
April 28, 2009 at 10:36 pm |
I read “advocate happy” as a new term for “litigious” and thought credit-card companies were being carpeted for taking debtors to court too readily.
April 29, 2009 at 11:17 pm |
Zut. I read it in a similar way Ian Preston did, but thought “advocate-happy” meant something like “lobbying in an inappropriately intense manner”.
April 30, 2009 at 9:33 pm |
If they’d hyphenated “advocate happy” I’d have read that, too, but they didn’t – and since they did hyphenate “credit-card” it didn’t steer me wrong.
That’s probably giving them too much credit.
May 8, 2009 at 1:09 pm |
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