Timothy McNulty is the Chicago Tribune's public editor, and I enjoy his willingness to listen to criticism. Apparently they get a lot, and today's column was about how they mishandle English. He brought out a lot of good points, many of which could be posts. But here is one that intrigues me. What does this headline mean to you? "Not into football, Bears waive injured tackle Brant." McNulty states that the "misplaced modifier inadvertently suggests that the Bears are not into football." Misplaced? Everytime I read it, I take it to mean just that. How do you read it?

If you read the column, you will see that McNulty also praises Strunk and White to high heaven. I emailed him and sent him this column about Strunk and White from Language Log. I loved this comment from Language Log's column: "This poor student has apparently been told by some other professor to purchase Strunk and White (sometimes parents give their children copies of Strunk and White to take off to college, a practice I believe constitutes child abuse), and she has read it, and has believed the things it says." I told McNulty that he was wrong to recommend that book. It is way too rigid for our language, which is dynamic and ever-changing. I suggested the Chicago Manual of Style instead; at least that gives alternatives.

It seems ambiguous to me, but my first thought was that the bears aren't "into" football. So where'd we get "into" as meaning "interested in?" And how'd you stuff a bear inside a football anyway?

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"Not into football, Bears waive injured tackle Brant."

The sentence makes no sense at all to me. Of course, newspaper headlines tend to assume that readers are in possession of the specialist knowledge of the subject that will help make sense of their "headlinese". I don't have that knowledge.

It doesn't seem ambiguous to me. I can only see one meaning.

The Bears have waived their contract with someone called Brant (whose position is apparently "tackle") because they (the Bears) are not interested in football. I see no other way of interpretting it.

I guess this means that they will be be closing the franchise and going into something else, perhaps baseball.

Here's another strange construction from the Powell's.com site to which I linked in another thread: "That's less than 36 cents/week for every word of content available in the print version,"

Do they mean to say they'll charge $.36 for each word? Damn, that's expensive!!!

"Not into football, Bears waive injured tackle Brant."

Well, here's the story.

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"He was injured, and that hurt his situation," Bears coach Lovie Smith said. "But he was ready to move on too. He just wasn't into football right now. So it was more that than anything."

Seems not to be ambiguous, but who can tell how the minds of grammar mavens work. I snorted at the "problems" of part- vs full-time mothers and the snit-fit over not using the preterit subjunctive, but what about the literal meaning of the phrase "education is priceless" in the cited ad copy? Priceless means "without price", but I can give you the price of my education since I paid for it. People, like Lynne Truss, get their knickers in a knot over words like decimate meaning only "to kill every tenth person", but then fall down on the job when it comes to something like "priceless". Feh!

I agree with everything you say, z, but one: The "not ambiguous" interpretation of that headline. Remember, I live in Chicago and I know a little about the Bears (not much, I agree), and I had no idea what that meant until you posted that explanation. The only alternative I could think of besides the Bears not being into football (and that didn't make sense) was that we aren't even into the football season yet, and they waived Brant. I would never have taken it the way it actually was meant.

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and they waived Brant

The verb "to waive" means "to decline to exercise a right" so far as I am aware. How can you decline to exercise a person?

The phrase still makes no sense to me; could someone translate it into normal English, devoid of "headlinese"?

Another definition of to waive:

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4. make player available to other team: to remove a professional ball player from a team's roster, thereby making the player available to other teams.

Pretty much what Bob suggested above:

The Bears have waived their contract with someone called Brant (whose position is apparently "tackle") because they (the Bears) are not interested in football. I see no other way of interpretting it.

As for tackle as a substantive, here:

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4. [American] Football.
a. One of two offensive linemen positioned between the guard and the end on either side of the ball.
b. One of two defensive linemen positioned to the inside of either end.
c. Either of these positions.

I'm not a great fan of (American) football, but I did recognize that a tackle was some kind of player's position. Just as I don't know what a silly mid on is, but I recognize it as a position in (English) cricket and that he's close to the batsman.

I had never seen that definition of waive previously, nor had I ever heard of a position called a tackle. In football and rugby (neither of which sports I know very much about) I do know that a tackle is the action of trying to get the ball from another player, or the verb describing the action. It's not a position.

Well, the one thing different from Bob's interpretation was that Bob thought, as I did, that the Bears were not interested in football. I still contend that unless someone was particularly familiar with Brant (I am not) or one read the article, he or she would not understand the headline. After all, many people read headlines without reading the article. It's a small thing, I agree, but it certainly was poorly constructed and absolutely could have irritated the Chicago Bears corporation.

The system of sports trades in American Football, Basketball, and Baseball is quite complicated. I follow all of these sports, and even I don't understand all of it. In Baseball, you can put a player on "waivers", or "waive" him, in which case another team can attempt to pick him up, which is fine, unless another team also decides to acquire the player, or the original team withdraws the waivers. One problem with major professional sports today is that the trading system is bogged down in minutia, and even dedicated fans struggle to understand it.

This article is wrong on some of the points it makes: subjunctive, disinterested, stranded prepositions. This line indicates that the author doesn't really know what they're talking about: "Text messaging has its own language, which makes grammar almost irrelevant." How can grammar be irrelevant to a language?

There's a huge gap between what most people are taught about language and what language really is. A lot of people's knowledge of grammar has as much to do with actual English grammar as the geocentric model of the solar system has to do with the heliocentric model.

Geoffrey Pullum:

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Try to imagine biological education being in a state where students are taught that whales are fish because that is judged easier for them to grasp; where teachers disapprove of tomatoes and teach that they are poisonous (and evidence about their nutritional value is dismissed as irrelevant); where educated people accuse biologists of "lowering standards" if they don't go along with popular beliefs. This is a rough analog of where English grammar finds itself today. The state of relations between the subject as taught by the public and the subject as understood by specialists is nothing short of disastrous. The fact is that almost everything most educated Americans believe about English grammar is wrong. In part this is because of misconceptions concerning the facts. In part it is because hopeless descriptive classifications and antiquated theoretical assumptions doom all discussion to failure. Amazingly, almost nothing has changed in over a hundred years. The 20th century came and went without affecting the presentation of grammar in popular books or the teaching (what little there is of it) that goes on in schools. Today's grammar books differ in content only trivially from early 19th-century books.

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How can grammar be irrelevant to a language?

How can any language exist without grammar?

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Originally posted by Richard English:
How can any language exist without grammar?

Well exactly. That's why the line about text messaging having no grammar is so silly.

Technically, yes. But we all know what he meant, don't we? I believe this is semantics, rather than the author not knowing what he is talking about.

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Technically, yes. But we all know what he meant, don't we? I believe this is semantics, rather than the author not knowing what he is talking about.

I've been thinking about that. He uses "proper grammar" and "correct grammar" when he presumably means "traditional prescriptive grammar," but in this sentence he just uses "grammar". If he meant "traditional prescriptive grammar," wouldn't he say "proper grammar"? Maybe not.

I think this shows that we all need some better education in this subject, so we can all talk more clearly about it.

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Technically, yes. But we all know what he meant, don't we? I believe this is semantics, rather than the author not knowing what he is talking about.

You know what he's talking about because you are American. I know what he's talking about because though I'm not American I used to take some interest in American Football. (To distinguish it from Soccer)

However the sentence carries all sorts of problems for someone who knows nothing about American football.

IT should be possible to deduce from "football" that we are talking about sport and that "tackle" is likely to be a position. The use of waive seems clear enough. BUT there is no getting round the fact that the impression given is that it is the Bears who are no longer interested in football. .

Now this seems monumentally unlikely to me - with insider knowledge it seems much more likely that it is Brant who has lost interest - but franchises have died in the past and it is possible. The headline is comprehensible, but only to the initiated.

Bob is quite right. Sports headlines are quite impenetrable to those without the specialist sports knowledge. I never read the back pages of newspapers since they contain nothing but sports news which is of zero interest to me. However, for the purposes of this post I checked the headlines in yesterday's London Lite (an evening free sheet) and here are some of the headlines, not one of which makes the slightest sense to me.

Jol left in limbo for two weeks as Bent speaks out for boss
Styles under fire after laying Roman road
Lawton sees a "chink" in Khan
It's all systems go for Luca's moon mission
Deng all set to fly the British flag

To be fair, of course, the purpose of the headline is simply to attract the attention of the reader and readers with no interest in the topic of the article aren't going to read it, no matter what the headline says.

(Actually, I did read the article under the last headline and it seems that "Deng" is a Chicago Bulls star, who is, apparently, 6' 8" tall and he was to be be playing his chosen sport [the article didn't say what that was] in Birmingham last night). I am slightly better informed now I've read the article - but only slightly.

Of course, headlinese is a language all of its own and rather an interesting topic. A journalist friend of mine told me that the fad for abbreviating celebrities' names (Di, Gazza, Macca) was created by headline writers who could thereby use a larger typeface.

Headline on the story of an escapee from a mental hospital who committed rape ..... Nut Bolts & Screws ...

Here's a brief note on that famous 1975 headline "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD". For those of us who lived in the metro area at the time, that one probably replaces "man bites dog" as the prototypical headline.

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Originally posted by jerry thomas:
Headline on the story of an escapee from a mental hospital who committed rape ..... Nut Bolts & Screws ...

I think you missed out part of the story. It was two washerwomen that he raped before running away again. The correct headline was

Nut Screws Washers and Bolts

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You know what he's talking about because you are American. I know what he's talking about because though I'm not American I used to take some interest in American Football. (To distinguish it from Soccer)

Bob, I was not talking about the headline. I have already posted that I'd never have understood what that reporter meant. I am with you and Richard on that.

What I was responding to was Goofy's comment (I should have quoted his comment above; I am sorry):

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This line indicates that the author doesn't really know what they're talking about: "Text messaging has its own language, which makes grammar almost irrelevant." How can grammar be irrelevant to a language?

Goofy, as to your answer to me, I see your point. I suspect I am a little biased because generally I really respect and admire the author, Timothy McNulty. It would be similar to your thinking Language Log was "all wet." But, I think you are right that, in his comments on grammar, McNulty just doesn't know what he is talking about.

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(Actually, I did read the article under the last headline and it seems that "Deng" is a Chicago Bulls star, who is, apparently, 6' 8" tall and he was to be be playing his chosen sport [the article didn't say what that was] in Birmingham last night). I am slightly better informed now I've read the article - but only slightly.

That's so exciting, Richard! I love Deng! He is one of my favorite Bulls players!

As a follow-up to McNulty's article, he received lots of comments from readers about grammar pet peeves, and the like. Most were trivial, again, and I am sure Language Log would have fun with them.

However, there was one story that I thought would interest Wordcrafters. Here it is:

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One of the more intriguing messages came from a Chicago lawyer who recalled when he was a young, summer associate at a firm handling a $50 million case. He believed the case hinged on the construction of one overlooked sentence buried in a 50-page contract.

First, he had to persuade his skeptical boss to let him argue the language issue. Then he challenged a panel of Illinois Supreme Court justices to recall their grammar school skills and diagram "a very complex, compound, run-on sentence."

They took the bait.

"The court held that the phrase that everybody in the case thought modified 'A' actually modified 'B,' so we won."

Most language questions won't win $50 million judgments, but concerns about grammar and usage do touch readers' daily lives.

I thought that was one of those rare, isolated cases, but Shu tells me that he had a similar one. Now I wonder if grammar in legal documents is the cause for many disputes.

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Now I wonder if grammar in legal documents is the cause for many disputes.

I had always understood that the reason for the turgid and arcane prose that litters legal documents, was to make the content unambiguous (albeit terminally boring!)

The most common case of this sort is an argument over a comma. For example, if it is stated that something should by divided equally between A, B and C, does that mean than A gets half and B and C share the other half?

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Originally posted by Richard English:

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and they waived Brant

The verb "to waive" means "to decline to exercise a right" so far as I am aware. How can you decline to exercise a person?

The phrase still makes no sense to me; could someone translate it into normal English, devoid of "headlinese"?

Because Brant was no longer interested in football, AND he was now injured, the Bears released him from his contract.

I don't pay that much attention to the legalese of professional sports, but our neighbors' son was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings (an NFL Football team) after graduating from college. Before he could play in his first game, he injured his shoulder in practice. For the next 14 months, he was on the Vikings' payroll, still sitting on the bench, and then he was "waived" at what would have been the start of his second season. He's now working in advertising in New York.

I read the headline the same way as the rest of you did, only when I read the bit about the misplaced modifier, the only alternative meaning I could think of was that Brant was not into football, which made no sense. Turns out that was right. I guess he was lucky he was injured.

headline should have said something like "Bears waive injured tackle Brant: "He's not into football" Or "Bears waive injured, unenthusiastic Brant." Course, the thing with headlines is, they have to fit the space. In my first job, I had to write lots of them, and if you don't have a good news editor, it's easy to wander off the track just in the interest of making the length right.

Wordmatic

All the salient points having been covered herein, I'd just like to add one thing: the person who wrote to the Ombudsman of the Chicago Tribune regarding this headline was just being a putz, and I'll guarandamtee you *he knew exactly what the headline meant, no ambiguities. And so did 99.99% of those who picked up that Sport(s) Section of the Tribune and noticed that headline -- in fact, your unwashed (out of those I've cited) wouldn't even have considered the alternate reading.

*<8^)

The truth of the matter is that we look at these and we (the ones who have a background in languages and grammar) can see the problem and chuckle but NO ONE will genuinely misunderstand. Those without the necessary sporting knowledge may struggle but nobody will actually deduce the incorrect meaning.

When I see misplaced modifier examples this is almost always the case. When I have time I'll pull out some of the "classic" examples and see if anyone believes that they would genuinely mistake the meaning.

Here as a single sample from Fowler.

A letter from a firm to a customer.

Dear Sir
we beg to enclose herwith the statement of your account and being desirous of clearing our books will you kindly favour us with a cheque in settlement.

Reply from customer.

You have been misinformed. I have no wish to clear your books.

Would anyone really interpret the sentence that way or was the customer just being a bit of a prat?

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Originally posted by Richard English:

I had always understood that the reason for the turgid and arcane prose that litters legal documents, was to make the content unambiguous (albeit terminally boring!)

Not so. The principle reason is the strong tendency repeat, verbatim, the language that has been used in previous documents of the same type. And this is not silly; there are good reasons for it:

• Is it fair to expect the client to pay for often-substantial time a rewrite will require, if the changes, however graceful, are merely esthetic?
• Redrafting, however careful you may be, runs the risk that you will slip up and insert a perhaps-critical error in the wording, an error that had not existed before.
• The existing language may have been construed by a court, whose decision you could cite as precedent should its meaning be disputed. Changing the language loses that benefit.
• One who follows the "standard language" (even if it later turns out to be defective) did not commit malpractice, for his practice met the normal standard of the legal profession. One who redrafts, and errs, is open to a malpractice suit.

(A secondary cause of legal prose seeming "arcane": it often uses specialized words, unfamiliar to the layman, because they have very precise meaning. For example, "kill" is a broad concept, but "commit murder" is tightly defined by statute and by generations of court decisions.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

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the person who wrote to the Ombudsman of the Chicago Tribune regarding this headline was just being a putz, and I'll guarandamtee you *he knew exactly what the headline meant, no ambiguities.

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The truth of the matter is that we look at these and we (the ones who have a background in languages and grammar) can see the problem and chuckle but NO ONE will genuinely misunderstand.

I would disagree with this. I did not understand the headline, though I admit I didn't know the problems the Bears have had with Brandt. As I said above, I had thought the "not into football" meant the season hadn't started yet because I did know that the Bears were into football so that couldn't possibly be accurate. The lawyer's example clearly showed that these misunderstandings occur and can create serious problems. Shu told me of a similar situation he was intricately involved with, and my daughter, though a novice lawyer, also has seen grammatical errors or ambiguous writing causing misunderstandings. And that's just law. I've seen it all the time with medical orders, and sometimes ambiguities have been the cause of injuries and deaths. I don't think we can assume that these sorts of ambiguities are always understood.

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I'll guarandamtee you *he knew exactly what the headline meant, no ambiguities...And so did 99.99% of those who picked up that Sport(s) Section of the Tribune and noticed that headline -- in fact, your unwashed (out of those I've cited) wouldn't even have considered the alternate reading.

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I would disagree with this. I did not understand the headline..

Kalleh, as I read your original post, you didn't qualify under this, not having read the headline in the Sport(s) Section. <g>

True. I had only read about it in the public editor's column. I wouldn't have understood it, though...until, of course, I read the article. Then I am sure I would have gotten it. So perhaps that's what you meant.

actually®, what I *think I meant was that unless you were a (Chicago Bears) football fan you were unlikely to have seen this headline in the sport section and had the opportunity to understand it, or not -- and you didn't (see it, that is) until Mr. Putz came along!

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Would anyone really interpret the sentence that way or was the customer just being a bit of a prat?

Or possibly just making the point that the writers of the original item should have taken more care in its construction.

If that is being a prat, then I have been guilty of prattish behaviour myself.

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If that is being a prat, then I have been guilty of prattish behaviour myself.

Richard, are you baiting us?

Please forgive the emoticon. I fell off the wagon, I fear (Now I must find out where that phrase came from; Wordcraft sometimes just drives me nuts!). I can't live without those emoticons!

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
I fell off the wagon, I fear (Now I must find out where that phrase came from; Wordcraft sometimes just drives me nuts!).

World Wide Words:

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The original form, which dates from the early years of the twentieth century, was to be on the water-wagon, implying that the speaker was drinking water rather than alcohol and so was an abstainer, at least for the time being.

Tinman

Thanks, Tinman. I always like Quinion.

In searching, I found this site that we've probably posted somewhere along the line, but I don't recall seeing it. On the wagon/fall off the wagon is down at the end with the Ws.