indessed roscivs

For a while now, I’ve been collecting newspaper headlines that I’ve found, for whatever reason, difficult to parse. Today, I discovered a neologistic name for such garden-path headlines, brought to you by the venerable Language Log: crash blossoms.

Like mondegreen, Cupertino, and eggcorn, “crash blossoms” is taken from an example of what the phrase itself refers to. The original headline is, “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms”. Your first attempt at parsing this headline might end in confusion, as you likely took “JAL crash blossoms” to be a noun phrase (especially given the priming effect of seeing “crash blossoms” by itself elsewhere in my post). However, the intention behind the headline is that “JAL crash” is the noun phrase, and “blossoms” is a verb whose subject is the violinist. A less ambiguous rewording would be, “The career of the violinist who was linked to the Japan Airline crash has been blossoming.”

The first headline I saw that made me start writing them down was: “Avalanches Close Passes”. At first I couldn’t figure if the avalanches had caused the mountain pass to be closed, or whether the road closure due to avalanches had passed and is now over. After some thought, it seemed obvious that the first meaning is the correct one, but it took me several attempts to make it through successfully.

Another amusing headline I saw recently was: Peanut Plant Was Cited for Violations. I pictured inspectors digging up an individual peanut plant and issuing it a citation. And, in the hockey arena, I saw this headline: Varlamov’s clutch save keys Washington’s Game 1 win. I still don’t understand who thought that mouthful of a headline was a good eye-catcher, but I find it almost impossible to parse the first time through.

Seen any good ones yourself?

It’s been a while, but so far I’m still very happy with the iPhone. In fact, I just discovered a Wordpress iPhone app that let’s me write posts (like this one) on the iPhone, even when I’m not connected to the Interwebs (like now, when I’m waiting underground for the subway).

There are still significant annoyances, though. Selecting a block of text is often insanely hard (especially if you don’t want to select on a word boundary, or if you want to select more than a screenful of text but not “select all”). Battery suckage is immense, especially since the 3.0 upgrade.

And it’s still annoying that I can’t fix the screen to be horizontally rotated. The “iPhone can’t rotate 180 degrees” trick makes surfing while lying down bearable, at least—otherwise you’d never be able to have the screen properly rotated no matter how you held it—but if I move from one side to the other, I have to rotate the phone 180 degrees (and slowly, often pausing for five or six seconds at 90 degrees to get the iPhone to adjust) before I can continue my reading or browsing or whatnot. Hardly a seamless experience. And sometimes it just doesn’t rotate at all.

I haven’t tried kanji input much lately. I got a special iPhone stylus, which worked surprisingly well for drawing characters, but at the end of the day the minor differences between the Japanese and Chinese characters made it more or less unworkable for daily study. However, I’ve discovered renshuu.org, which has the vocabulary for the textbook my class is using, conveniently separated by chapter, and a Leitner-style spaced repetition algorithm to ensure that I get the most practice on the words I know the least. In the latest site upgrade, they’ve even made the multiple-choice questions more tricky, making it difficult to guess if you don’t really know what the word is. I’ve been doing that vocabulary practice nearly every day, and I think it’s helped significantly.

All in all, the iPhone has been a win in general, but I wish they’d fix some of the minor annoyances.