“Cold spurs rush to shelters”
This was the top headline in the 24 Hours daily this morning, noticed on the paper the woman across from me on the SkyTrain was reading (perish the thought of someone thinking I would actually touch that paper unless utterly deprived of all other news media).
What I can’t understand is why we’re suddenly anthropomorphising spurs by implying that they rush anywhere, why they would rush to shelters, and why they felt particularly cold in the first place (I mean, come on, people, 5 degrees is not too terribly cold, and face it — spurs are made of metal, anyway — no temperature sensing neurons).
Jokes aside, you have to admit that’s an impressive string of words all having ambiguous parts of speech. I’m not sure I could have come up with something like that without thinking about it pretty hard, and there’s no telling how long it took non-native English speakers to decode a headline mess like that. Anyone need a job as a copy editor?
You asked for a copyeditor? You got one!
The way it’s writeen it could either mean that cold spurs are rushing to shelters (which doesn’t make any sense) or that the cold weather
is spurring people to get the hell out of the cold.
If I suspected that those free papers were offering an sort of reasonable salary, I’d drop out of copyeditor school and get down with their confusing headlines. Maybe “Shelters Help Homeless Escape the Cold?”
Good eye there, Matt.
I often marvel at how bad many headlines are in the first place — words get chopped to such a degree that they only really make sense to people who already know what the article is about. But I think this was the worst because it’s not only ambiguous, but so perfectly parses in an alternate meaning.
Reminds me of that old email about the mistakes in church bulletins. “Ladies, don’t forget the rummage sale. It is a good chance to get rid of those things not worth keeping around the house. Bring your husbands.”