Confederacy of a Dunce - Awkward headlines

Monday, March 09, 2009

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Today I came across a very confusing headline:

"Sugababes rubbish split reports"

Although I have the advantage of knowing what "Sugababes" means (London pop band of the past 10 years), my first (and maybe more) readings of the headline offered various kinds of interpretations. The headline (and the confusion it can cause) is a good example of British tabloid style (see this Language Log post for more examples) which can lead to ambiguity due to a pileup of nouns. In this case, all four words in the headline could be nouns; the trick is to find the verbs. The first possibility I considered started with "Sugababes [are] rubbish..." (a commonly held opinion but surely not that newsworthy) but this one breaks down with "split reports". The next thought was that the article had something to do with the group's trash (e.g. "we provide an investigative look at how this pop group is separating out recyclables"; or "there are conflicting reports about the Sugababes' rubbish"). Environmental stories are all the rage, but this is not the theme of the article either. Also unlikely is some kind of story about a food product ("rubbish split", perhaps something like a banana split where you add whatever ingredients are available?).

As it turns out, the trick is that "rubbish" is the verb here, meaning "to criticize". Thus the Sugababes are responding to reports that they are breaking up with a vigorous rebuttal (possibly to be followed by an actual break-up... only time will tell). The original article can be found here if for some inexplicable reason you are interested in finding out more.

language | music

Monday, March 09, 2009 2:13:33 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)