Crash Blossoms

"Crash Blossoms" are ambiguous headlines that can be quite funny. They result from the space-saving technique of leaving out articles, conjunctions, and sometimes even verbs.

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

My favorite example from the article is “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” Link

Crash Blossoms is a blog that collects these headlines for your amusement. Link -via Metafilter