Monday, March 09, 2009
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Awkward headlines
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)  #    Disclaimer  |  Comments [3]  |  Related posts:
dunce, PhD
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Thursday, March 12, 2009 2:33:32 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Well, so glad to see you back on yur Blog after so long absence! You are always interesting to say the least!! Well, most of the time anyway.
Big Mama | bigmamaAT NOSPAMhenderson dot net
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 4:25:54 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
At first I thought it was nonsense, but within 10 seconds realised it was a news ad and decoded the message.

nice excerpt
penot
Thursday, June 11, 2009 6:24:39 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Please - I hope no very sad or horrible thing has happened to stop you blogging. Some idle readers miss you. Please don't publish my web address unless (for what reason?) you think it's relevant. I paste it here just as a sign of good faith. I particularly look forward to posts dealing with sign language as a language and I appreciate your explorations of urban Britain. [And I abhor the word "Britain" but employ it here as the tersest form.]
Amanda | cataneaAT NOSPAMhotmail dot com
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