Parsing (kind of like Snakes On A Plane?)

Being the condescending westerner that I am, I was enjoying this seemingly eccentric phrasing on the menu of a local Moroccan restaurant:

The Argan bears plum-sized fruits, which are eaten by goats on the tree.

Ha! Goats in a tree! Crazy Moroccans. Then Michael pointed out to me that there actually were goats up in the tree in the photo next to this paragraph.
It turns out that goats actually do climb Argan trees to get at the fruit. Who knew?


Photo from Wikipedia

Newspaper headline nouns superfluity confusion!

Here is a headline from the BBC news today:

Balloon crash safety changes call

When I read a sentence, I usually look for the various parts of it that help me decipher its meaning. In English, we usually have at least one noun and one verb per sentence. In the sentence 'the cat fell,' for example, you have a clear ACTOR, the cat, and something that the cat did, which is fall.

It is an established tradition for newspaper headlines to include only the parts of a thought necessary to get the meaning across while still sounding URGENT. The BBC, whose ability to sound URGENT is always clearly evident, has nevertheless been doing a pretty terrible job lately at the whole 'making sense' bit. Why is this?

Newspaper headlines like

Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor

though not what you would call a complete sentence, make the actors and actions contained within the articles' text evident through inclusion of a standard complement of subjects, verbs, and objects, almost always in that order. This is how we communicate in English; we can figure out that the word 'bomb' should be taken as a verb because it occurs where we expect it to. The BBC's headlines, though, have been increasingly consisting of lists of nouns with no verbs at all.

Even in this dire situation, sense can usually be made of the headlines. A mild case, like

Obese mothers-to-be 'a burden'

includes helpful adjectives, articles, and punctuation (imagine the BBC copy editor's panic upon reading Obese mothers to be a burden!), and sticks mostly to nouns that are lexically unambiguous (can't be used as verbs). Slightly murkier, but still intelligible, is the recent headline

Hunt for clues to Indonesia crash

which contains two nouns that, without context, could function as verbs. Is the BBC commanding us to hunt? Does the hunt crash? What are the clues to Indonesia? But we are thinking, reasoning beings, after all, and surely some verbosity must be sacrificed for URGENCY and quickness of reporting.

Read today's example again, though.

Balloon crash safety changes call

There is only one noun in this whole headline that cannot be construed as a verb ('safety'). When you read a sentence expecting at least one verb, as most readers of English tend to do, such a buffet of potential action words can be staggering. Even more so when none of these 'verbs' makes the headline understandable. Not until the bewildered reader consults the text of the article (which is disappointingly dull compared to the Dadaistic headline) does it emerge that the BBC is hammering us over the head with one big, unwieldy compound noun with its head at the very end (call). What they are trying to tell us is that there has been a call for changes to crash safety guidelines in (hot air) ballooning. Sometimes reading the BBC feels like playing charades with Yoda...

Stay tuned for further special report: BBC noun club plot giant success. (Like the ambiguity in that one!?)

Depressing thought for the evening

Do a Google search for "navel reserve," and see how few of the hits are puns. An overwhelming majority are simple misspellings. Why aren't people funny, like me? Navel reserve! That's funny!

That's all.

___

10:00 pm.

Update, eodem die. Mood much improved. On my way home from 'work,' I encountered a consternated-looking 1Glasgow fox. I shared his consternation as we stood together, listening to the lush choral arrangement of 2"I walk the line" pouring forth from the window of the Postgraduate Club nearby. Our interest having faded, the fox politely excused himself and I continued on my way.

_______________________

1. Vulpes weegiensis, my first sighting this year!
2. Composer and lyricist: Johnny Cash, Choral Arrangement: anonymous, Maracas: anonymous but manifest and annoying.

More fun than a deaf cabbage.

A damp squid.

There's a long line of cars...

So I'm still composing my magnum opus to sum up my entire summer, but here's something to pass the time, those of you who are lonely. And bored. And amused by idiocy.

We're trying to come up with a line of automobiles to complete the offering of the company that makes the Food in Uzbekistan.

So far we have the following:

Food - Sedan (The Food SS is also available: Travel with the comfort of your
        very own ex-SS officer trapped in a cage under your seat!)
Tantrum - Sports Coupe
Transgressor - Sporty Sedan
Empanada - Pickup
Watusi - Wagon
Tendril - Amphicar? Motorcycle?
Cephalopod - Hybrid?
Nocturne - Convertible
Borgia - Deluxe Sedan
Piety - Economy Sedan

We still need a van name, and we're not stuck on the functions of the Tendril or the Cephalopod, though we're rather fond of the names.

Any feedback or further suggestions would be welcome.

---

Edit: We remembered today what the name of the SUV was! The Ragnarok.

Woes of a closet prescriptivist.
I've just identified the three things that most cause me pain in this world, and they're all fairly common spoken grammatical structures:

"The thing is, is..." The phrase "the thing is" has become such a common saying for many people that the words have become glued together into one morpheme, and the "is" no longer has meaning. These people need to add another "is" before it will make structural sense to them. Unfortunately, I am not one of these people.

"As best as I can" or "as best as possible." I heard this one last weekend, in the dialog of the movie "Troy." Grammatical errors in supposedly classical settings are the ones that irk me the most (don't get me started on "from whence"). "Best" is a superlative, and traditionally superlatives can't occupy this position: You can't say "He ran as fastest as he could," or even "as worst as I can." The "correct" phrase is "as best I can" or "as best is possible." To use a comparative structure, you have to use a comparative adverb: "as well as I can."

"The reason being is that..." "Being" is already a progressive verb, and insertion of the "is" verb makes this ungrammatical. Traditionally. A correct phrase would read "the reason being that..." However, in the popular mind, "reason being" has become yet another phrasal noun, which results in the necessity of another verb to take over for the "being" that stopped having any constructive value.

Having said all this, I'm a linguistics student, and we're supposed to be descriptive about all this, instead of telling people what to say. And besides, I do stuff all the time that isn't grammatical historically (like starting sentences with "and"). It's not so much that I think I have the best grammar, but once I get a handle on any one point, its misuse drives me crazy. I think what causes me the most mental anguish is the knowledge that knowing everyone is "doing it wrong" only shows what a lame snob I am!