… committed by The Onion recently (hat tip to Jerry Zee):
The line division really leads us to start by reading So Many Women as the direct object of Touched:
Tom Brokaw Touched So Many Women
(so that we expect a following result clause in that). But as Instagram commenters quickly noticed, we’ve been led down the garden path:
(It’s common for commenters to pick up on features of examples that are irrelevant to the point at hand — here, the non-clausemate reflexive himself and the discursive would go out of their way.)
From Ben Zimmer on LLog, on 8/26/09, “Crash blossoms”: Chris Waigl … describes “crash blossoms” as “those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking.”
(Crash blossoms are headlines that invite garden pathing, a form of premature closure in parsing that reveals a temporary ambiguity in the unfolding sentence.)
May 2, 2018 at 2:00 pm |
I’m just sitting here admiring the adjective <Brokavian. (Not a candidate for the oldest language, i suppose.)