Oh, the joys of clumsy headline writing. Here’s two versions of the same story. The first seemed really odd when I saw it come up in Google Reader. “Seattle Police Reportedly Kill Man With Knife” — as written, grammatically, that tells me that the police stabbed a man to death. But that can’t be right, can it? The article summary clears it up (mostly: one could make an argument that the summary states that the police killed a man by shooting a knife at him, but while that fits the grammar, it’s a bit of a stretch to think that someone would derive that meaning), as does the second article with a more well-written headline and summary, but it gave me a bit of a laugh.
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Even punctuation can do you in. This morning I tweeted a message that started with “scrobbling update: i think i broke wired headphones, using bluetooth.” In retrospect, I decided that I should have used a semicolon rather than a comma. To my knowledge, Bluetooth cannot break a wired headphone…
I just ran across a better one. In response to the news about Steve Jobs’ medical leave of absence, a commenter who shall remain nameless typed, “Apple has a history of innovation, which will continue with or without jobs.” And yes, he typed the “j” in “jobs” in lower case. I don’t think that was his intent.
Hehe. Details matter!