storytelling

Surely I didn't promise substance today. I must have been hallucinating the time to write. Instead I give you one of my favorite diversions, poorly written headlines that are far more amusing than they were meant to be. You've seen these before. Here are some of my favorites.

Grandmother of Eight Makes Hole in One
Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
Chef Throws His Heart into Helping Feed Needy
Arson Suspect is Held in Massachusetts Fire
Ban On Soliciting Dead in Trotwood
Lansing Residents Can Drop Off Trees
Local High School Dropouts Cut in Half

Some of these from Enjoy The Music, and the link from Language Log. There's a nicely put together summary of classic transformational grammar structural rules and trees here. Syntactic theory moved beyond this stage a log time ago, but it remains a useful tool. Linguists use headlines like the ones above to demonstrate structural issues. Editors could use this kind of basic syntactic mapping, too, as seen here. But I don't think most of them do. Just a guess.

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