{"id":218442,"date":"2010-01-20T21:26:34","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T02:26:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2063"},"modified":"2010-01-20T21:26:34","modified_gmt":"2010-01-21T02:26:34","slug":"an-ursine-crash-blossom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/218442","title":{"rendered":"An ursine crash blossom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/wonkette.com\/413291\/selfish-white-house-now-passing-blame-onto-innocent-animals\">Wonkette<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/rawstory.com\/2010\/01\/headline-white-house-bears-part-blame-senate-loss\/\">The Raw Story<\/a> comes this shocking political headline from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/idUSNN201344620100120\">Reuters newswire<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/img.wonkette.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/whitehousebears.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/p>\n<p>One can only imagine what <a href=\"http:\/\/ccinsider.comedycentral.com\/2008\/12\/02\/colberts-best-bear-moments\/\">Stephen Colbert<\/a> will have to say about this.<\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-2063\"><\/span>We&#8217;ve been down this road before with Reuters: see Arnold Zwicky&#8217;s 2007 post &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/004760.html\">From the headline desk at Language Log Plaza<\/a>&#8221; and my followup, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/004860.html\">Reuters says guilty of elliptical headlines<\/a>.&#8221; As we&#8217;ve documented, it&#8217;s long been the peculiar Reuters house style to create headlines of the form &#8220;X <em>say(s)<\/em> C,&#8221; where C is a complement clause missing a subject. This time around, the elision of the pronoun <em>it <\/em>results in <a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1693\">crash blossom-y<\/a> goodness, since the casual reader would assume that the subject of &#8220;Bears Part Of Blame For Senate Loss&#8221; is actually <em>bears<\/em>, construed as a plural noun, with the rest of the clause serving as predicate (and with the copula <em>are<\/em> deleted in typical headline style).<\/p>\n<p>This goes to show just how engrained the &#8220;X <em>say(s)<\/em> C&#8221; formula is at the Reuters copy desk, if they can rattle off a headline like this without stopping to consider how it would read to anyone not steeped in Reuters-ese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Wonkette and The Raw Story comes this shocking political headline from the Reuters newswire: One can only imagine what Stephen Colbert will have to say about this. We&#8217;ve been down this road before with Reuters: see Arnold Zwicky&#8217;s 2007 post &#8220;From the headline desk at Language Log Plaza&#8221; and my followup, &#8220;Reuters says guilty [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}