Monday, August 08, 2011

Cheap airline ticket offers inquiry

My parser/language faculty misparsed this classic bit of (British) headlinese this morning. Three reasons: the noun pileup stack atrocity, that 'offers' can be a verb, that I haven't had coffee yet.


Then I could feel some sort of pragmatic assessment kicking in. Wait, tickets don't offer things. But they might metaphorically. But not inquiries. And it snapped into place.

(From the Guardian frontpage this morning. And I got there before language log.)

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