I like puns and other plays on words. This is why I like doing cryptic crosswords, which depend more upon linguistic puzzles than the recall of facts, far more that the standard type. For that reason, they are harder to construct. Cryptic ones are more popular in the UK and other non-US English speaking countries, where newspapers often offer them on a daily basis. In the US The New Yorker magazine at one point offered a good cryptic crossword puzzle every Sunday but stopped doing so a few months ago, I presume because not enough people were doing it.
Because of my liking for word play, I often find humor in interpreting things differently from what the writer or speaker intended. And for someone like me, English idioms can be endlessly fascinating.
For example, I saw a heading in a newspaper on a story about the recent jewelry robbery at the Louvre that said “Prosecutor has ‘small hope’ of recovering Louvre jewels”.
I wondered what the writer intended to convey by saying ‘small hope’. If the article had said ‘little hope’, the common usage of that phrase would suggest that they have almost given up hope. But although ‘small’ and ‘little’ are pretty much synonymous, the use of ‘small hope’ conveys the sense that they do have some hope of recovery, quite different from ‘little hope’. In the body of the article, the article said ‘a small hope’ and that implies the same thing as ‘a little hope’, showing that the mere insertion of ‘a’ removes any ambiguity.
Newspaper headers are often the source of many ambiguities, sometimes quite humorous. Because they are tightly constrained for space, the headline writers omit punctuation and articles like ‘a’ and ‘the’ and this is can lead to ambiguity and amusement.
I come across such items all the time but was saved from making my own compilation because someone else has taken the trouble to do so, with gems such as “Teacher Strikes Idle Kids”, “Mrs. Gandhi stoned at rally in India”, “Complaints About NBA Referees Growing Ugly”, and “Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax”.
Sometimes it is clear that the headline writer is having a bit of fun but others may be inadvertent. Either way, I enjoy them. They provide a welcome break from serious news.
Baby swallows fly.
Mano, have you tried the online Guardian cryptic crosswords (I do the weekday Cryptic and the Saturday Prize)? These days, they take up a good chunk of my time. Archived crosswords go back decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/series/cryptic
Panda: Eats, shoots and leaves.
How to tiptoe around someone and stay on the right side of them? (4-9)
Soft-pedalling?
Rob @#2,
I do the daily cryptic at the Toronto Globe and Mail and that already eats up enough of my time!
Okay, most of the linked list I can see where ambiguity lies, “to dog” vs “a dog” etc… but I can’t for the life of me figure out how “Enraged Cow Injures Farmer with Ax” doesn’t involve a cow swinging an axe at a farmer…
7) @robert79: not sure if serious, but the farmer is the one with the ax?
Just yesterday I read a review that said, “This first volume has our protagonist, an experienced player who wants to clear 99 games named Yuki, involved in two such games.” Made me wonder why they gave all the games the same name.
.
Yes, it’s funny, but these kinds of ambiguities, grammar errors, misspellings and malapropisms have proliferated to such an extent that it’s become really exhausting trying to parse people’s nonsense into what they actually meant to say. People write stream-of-consciousness now and never reread what they write before posting, and this includes people getting paid to write. I sometimes wonder if a hundred years from now anybody will even be able to understand anything written now (of course most of that will become lost or inaccessible when a massive emp wave wipes out all the digital archives). But I guess that would be true anyway, looking at how Middle English is a foreign language to most people now, and even the Constitution’s language can apparently be interpreted to mean whatever the reader wants.
@robert79: The “farmer with (an) ax” was injured by an enraged cow. It’s a bit of a grammatical fail, given that including the “an” would still make things ambiguous but easier to parse the way it was intended. But as Mano mentioned, newspapers often leave out a/an/the due to headline space constraints.