Fun with Crash Blossoms

Last week, the Associated Press had a rather alarming headline. It read “Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash lands in Eindhoven.” With the amount of tension that had been in the air around the two recent Malaysia Airlines crashes, it’s no surprise that many people interpreted this headline as meaning that the Dutch plane had crash-landed (a third crash), rather than the meaning that the AP intended, that the Dutch plane carrying bodies from the crash had landed (only two crashes). 

BREAKING: Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash lands in Eindhoven.— The Associated Press (@AP) July 23, 2014

The Original Crash Blossom

Although the ambiguous headline was quickly corrected, it remains interesting linguistically as an example of a phenomenon known as a crash blossom: a headline whose words are easily mis-parsed, often to humorous effect.

The name “crash blossom” is from an unfortunate headline similar in spirit to the Malaysia example: A user named Bessie3 posted to a forum called Testy Copy Editors the confusing headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms” in August 2009, and subsequent commenters decided that “crash blossoms” would be an appropriate name for similar examples. 

Lists of Crash Blossoms

The vividness and usefulness of crash blossoms meant that it quickly spread beyond the original forum post, to a blog post by linguist and writer John McIntyre and onto Language Log and elsewhere, aided by the fact that lists of crash blossoms are often highly entertaining to read. For example, even before the term crash blossom was coined, there were two compilations of such headlines from the Columbia Journalism Review, respectively titled Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim and Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge. More recently, there’s also an entire website, crashblossoms.com, that collects user-submitted examples of crash blossoms from the headlines.

Garden Path Sentences

Crash blossoms aren’t the only kind of confusing sentence structure. Other famous examples in psycholinguistics are known as garden path sentences, such as “the horse raced past the barn fell” or “the old man the boat.” When you first try to understand these sentences, they’ll lead you down a garden path of thinking they’re about about a horse who raced or an old man, but when you get to the end, you realize that you have to re-interpret them as about a horse who was raced past the barn and the old who man the boat.

Psycholinguists create garden path sentences deliberately, because people’s confusion at reading them tells us that we start trying to find meaning in a sentence as soon as we’re exposed to any part of it, rather than waiting until the end. But if you’re aiming for ease of comprehension rather than experimenting on your readers, you probably want to re-read your writing later or have someone proofread it to avoid crash blossoms, garden paths, and other kinds of misplaced modifiers. 

Why English Headlines Are Especially Susceptible to Crash Blossoming

English is particularly prone to crash blossoms and garden path sentences because so many of our words can belong to multiple parts of speech without any visible change: for example, crash can be a noun, as in I heard a loud crash, a verb, as in I don’t want to crash the car, or a modifier, as in crash victim.  In many other languages, nouns and verbs always have some sort of visible and audible difference between them, just like crashed must be a verb and not a noun. 

In normal prose, we’re less likely to encounter crash blossoms because we have lots of function words, like to and the, that help us distinguish between to crash and the crash. In a headline, on the other hand, where these short words are often omitted, it’s easy to end up with something that has multiple possible interpretations, and it’s hard to notice in your own writing because you already know which of these interpretations you’re intending. 

Spoken Language Can Be More Clear Than Written Language

Interestingly, if you’re learning about crash blossoms and garden path sentences by listening to the podcast version of this article, you may notice that it’s easier to get the intended meaning from spoken language than if you’re reading it in text. That’s because spoken language also comes with intonational cues about which words belong with which other words. For example, I might pause slightly between crash and lands if I’m talking about something to do with a crash that is landing, whereas I’d run crash and lands together if I’m talking about the entire event of crash-landing. We can approximate some of these cues with punctuation, such as a hyphen or a comma, but ultimately written language is just somewhat less precise when it comes to exactly how you’d pronounce something. 

Oh, and by the way, if you’re confused about what the original crash-blossom headline “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms” could possibly mean, John McIntyre explains that it refers to “a young violinist whose career has prospered since the death of her father in a Japan Airlines crash in 1985.” Smashing. 

That article [article] was written by Gretchen McCulloch who blogs at All Things Linguistic. Check out her site for other great posts.