Another query for the Clamor…any favorite ‘crash blossoms?’
There were people I wanted so much before I had them that the entire experience of having them was grief for my old hunger.
—Sarah Manguso
—from 300 Arguments
crash blossom. noun. An ambiguous headline, particularly one that yields comedic interpretations. Coined in 2009 by Danny Bloom based on the headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms” in Japan Today, crash blossoms tend to occur in headlines because of space constraints. These linguistic gems are a kind of garden path sentence, in which one must backtrack to resolve an ambiguity, most often due to words that can be nouns or verbs, as in the classic example: “The old man the boat.”
Language Log has a category devoted to crash blossoms with many great examples. One of my favorites: “Mutilated body washes up on Rio beach to be used for Olympics beach volleyball.”
Ben Zimmer wrote a New York Times column on the phenomenon yielding, among other gems, “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel.”
A few other choice examples:
“Fat men enjoy longer lasting sex scientific research show”
“McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers”
“Lawmen from Mexico Barbecue Guests”
“Genetic Engineering Splits Scientists”
“Girl found alive in France murders car”
“Trump demands dog ‘Dreamers’ deal”
10 Books About Words For Logophilic Readers Interested In The Wonders Of Language (I’ve read five of them and all were good).
Inside Racists Anonymous.
The Washington Post’s robot reporter has published 850 articles in the past year.
An awesome collection of 70s Movie Poster Typography.
President Trump’s Lawsuit Against Estate Of Johannes Gutenberg. While we’re linking to The Onion, how about this one: Historians Discover Meditation Spread From Ancient China By Annoying Monk Who Wouldn’t Shut Up About How It Changed His Life.
A quick-hit exploration of asemic writing/art, including examples from Henri Michaux and Xu Bing, author of A Book from the Sky.
I find Brand New, a site that collects changes to famous (and not-so-famous) brand logos, strangely addictive.
Merriam-Webster has quite a few word games on its site that Clamorites are likely to enjoy. I had fun with, and did terribly on, the Original Meanings Quiz (subtitled: a quiz for the pedantic and those annoyed by them!)
Today in 1917, Margaretha Geertruida ‘Margreet’ MacLeod (née Zelle), better known as Mata Hari, (in)famous femme fatale and legendary spy (or was she?), is executed by a firing squad in Paris. A bit of trivia: what do Mata Hari, Geronimo, Beethoven, Descartes and the Marquis de Sade have in common? They all had their heads (more or less) stolen.
From quarks and stuff to smart machines making more smart machines…in just under 20 minutes: a ► history of the entire world, i guess (through May 2017, at least).
► Fidget spinner spinning in space! Can we finally say the fidget spinner phenomenon has jumped the shark?
Reader B.: “Re: Abbot and Costello, this is a nice set of audio explorations. ¶ Fun podcast in general.”
Reader B. also adds: “Re: Frankenstein, the extra book is Volney’s Ruins of Empires. Really interesting late 18th-century book. Apparently the first European history to consider African nations on a par with their own.”
I appreciate the responses to my question about experiences discovering you had been mispronouncing a word for a long time. Perhaps my description of “mortified” was hyperbolic, though it’s been my experience that there can be a classist/elitist component to the experience, such as the time in my first year of college when I, a “hick from the sticks,” managed to mispronounce both clique (it’s not click-way) and cliché (it’s not kleesh) in the same presentation in a literature class I was in every way unready for. Anyway, on to your thoughts:
Reader R.: “I could not count the number of times I’ve learned my pronunciation was wrong. I have always thought it came from learning words through reading rather than hearing. Since that is a mark of grace I have never been mortified.”
Reader A.: “The only one is from long long ago. My favorite vegetable as a kid were those little kidney shaped green beans. One time in class (like 2nd grade) my teacher asked the class if anyone knew what a llama was. I shot my hand in the air and described the beans…”
Reader S.: “I learned in my fifties (I am now in my seventies, but the pain of the discovery is still raw) that I was saying “donkey” wrong. Until that moment, I had pronounced it to rhyme with “monkey”. The way I say it now doesn’t rhyme with anything really, but at least I’m saying it right: ‘don’ as in ‘Donald’. ¶ Or perhaps it isn’t that simple. I was born and live in England, but between the ages of fifteen months and nearly eight years, I lived in the USA, in New Jersey to be more precise, and I have occasionally vaguely wondered whether NJ people say “donkey” to rhyme with “monkey”. Or perhaps I have always had something of a tin ear.”
Reader D.: “I’ve never been sure how to pronounce ‘plebeian.’ I thought I knew how to pronounce it, and then I had someone rather disdainfully pronounce it a different way (to make the point that I did not know how to pronounce it, but also to undermine the point I was making in what I was saying. In other words, her goal was to make me feel dumb because she did not like my point. But I still avoid using it because I’m afraid that I pronounce it in the wrong way.”
Reader G.: “Hors d’oeuvres is, of course, the mispronunciation I was teased for most ruthlessly. Deservedly so as I was well aware of how to pronounce the word when used at a party, but I believed it to be a different word when I read it in a cookbook. I’m sure there were many, many more, as my parents and older brother loved to laugh at my expense when they corrected me.”
Reader J. "…try as I may, I can’t think of a comparable experience of my own, and I’m guessing that the reasons for this are more interesting than the fact itself, to wit:
it’s much more likely that someone would mispronounce a word than that they’d discover it; or so it seems to me, since I never discover any such thing;
I’m fiendishly driven to look things up, and (I believe) much more likely to make a wild (but pronounceable) substitution than to risk using a word I’m not sure about;
(and this is a rich one!) I have a passable working knowledge of English morphemes and their lexical combinations, and an absurd confidence in my capacity to engage and produce new combinations in an appropriate way. This in no way assures that I’ll pronounce unfamiliar words (most of mine are medicinal, these days: ah, rosuvastatin! oh, sweet finasteride!) correctly; but it does assure that I think I’m pronouncing them aright, and thus I proceed with sublime confidence and scorn all nay-sayers. Quod erat demonstrandum."
I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.
Enjoy the WORK section? Try Notabilia http://ktxc.to/nb for a new WORK every day and concīs http://ktxc.to/concismag publishing original short pieces of all kinds.
And please feel free to share anything here as far and wide as you want! If you want to give a shout-out, please link to: http://katexic.com/.
You just read issue #358 of katexic clippings. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.