That has to be simply a crash.

(OPT: a link would assist in this necromancy.)

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-17/indian-mining-company-adani-fighting-corruption-allegations/4319036?section=business

Don’t you agree that that was slightly unfair, OPT?

The entire headline is:

Corruption claims dog miner with eye on Australia

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Now, I’ll never know if I would have experienced the actual headline as a “crash blossom” or otherwise.

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Of course, to your credit, had you had made the claim that the crash blossom was:

“Corruption claims dog miner with eye”, it would have been even more unfair.

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Is the crash blossom able to be isolated, as you suggest, to “Corruption claims dog miner”? Or does the crash blossom arise only within the entirety of the originally encountered form? 

I think the latter.

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When I worked on my first ranch, the rancher said to me, “I’m gonna get my dogs in. Pull out a bail, spread it around.”

I’d been working on his ranch for a week or two and had never seen any dogs.

I said, “You’ve got dogs?”

He looked at me for about two seconds. That was uncomfortably too long, but just long enough for him to be sure that I “got it.”

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So, I confess that I have had difficulty with “dog” in the past.

Yippie-I/O-kiayey!

I don’t think so: basically either meaning works just as well with “with eye on Australia”

languagehat - 16 April 2011 04:59 AM

Huh.  Well, once again I learn not to generalize.  To me, “mount” = “mountain” is not a word I would ever expect to see in the newspaper except as part of a name.

Same here.

Corruption claims dog miner with eye on Australia

To my mind, the intended meaning is more obvious in the full headline, but the crash blossom works in both versions.

It took my a couple of minutes to puzzle out the intended meaning of the shortened headline. If I had seen “with eye on Australia,” I think it would have taken me less time as it makes it clearer that the “miner” is a mining interest and not an individual with a pick and shovel, the noun phrase “corruption claims” (i.e., claims of corruption) is easily associated with a foreign mining interest doing business in a country. Without the final phrase I was having trouble envisioning that corruption would negatively impact a miner. (Cave-ins, lack of oxygen, black lung disease, sure, but not corruption.)

For me, the penny didn’t drop until I started to read the article.  Even the full headline would not compute for me (although I didn’t ponder it very long before reading the article).

I long ago gave up expecting news headlines to make much sense. When they occasionally do, I put it down to sheer chance.

My experience was similar to Dave’s: I found the headline significantly easier to parse when “with an eye on Australia” was added.  When I read “miner” I think of a guy with a shovel and a pick-axe, not a millionaire (or billionaire)who owns a mining company, and a guy with a shovel and pickaxe is unlikely to be suspected of committing “corruption” and is also relatively unlikely to complain of corruption by others (since he or she has bigger things to worry about).  Once I read “with an eye on Australia” I realized that this was a person looking to start a mining operation in Australia (a person with both the means to and a motive to grease more than a few palms), and the correct reading of the headline snapped into focus.  In my case, I tried to make sense of the original rendering of the headline (and couldn’t) but was able to parse out the full headline without reading the full article and without reading any dead-give-aways in the other posts.

Getting back to the OP: I immediately understood the (storm damages mount) headline, and actually had trouble imagining what the crash-blossom reading of it might be.  I believe, FWIW, that “damages” is fairly commonly used in the US as short-hand for “the economic cost of repairing damaged property”, and it does not necessarily carry with it an implication that those costs were or will be awarded to a plaintiff by a judge as a result of a lawsuit.  But I believe it is more common in “newspeak” than in everyday speech or in other forms of writing.

There is also an even more informal sense of damages (i.e., more informal than the newspeak one), of using it as a way of referring to the cost of anything, particularly a purchase of something that is somewhat extravagant.  But in headline-ese, “damages” seems to only be used when referring to the economic cost of a destructive event or some other type of severe financial setback, and not in a jocular sense of “how much will this materialistic indulgence cost me?”, unless the writer is trying to be cute.

This talk of ‘crash blossoms’ may be unfamiliar to many of us. How about a ‘Big List’ entry, Dave?  Here’s a start:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html

Not quite a crash blossom but here’s another potentially ambiguous headline:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-18/ecuador-declares-volcano-alert/4433336
Ecuador declares volcano alert

Well, I suppose it’s potentially confusing, but surely the potential is rather small?  Obviously, this is the story about the nation of Ecuador officially recognizing that a volcano is not only self-aware but also extremely sensitive to sensory input.

But, I suppose what’s confusing to some is clear to others.  This headline, for example, was baffling to me, but others claimed that they found it easy to decode:

“Coin change ‘skin problem fear’”

Here’s a link for those interested in decoding it (and who don’t find the solution self-evident).

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3916

Well, I suppose it’s potentially confusing, but surely the potential is rather small? 

Well I didn’t call it potentially confusing. I agree it would not confuse anyone.

OP Tipping - 18 December 2012 05:38 AM

Well, I suppose it’s potentially confusing, but surely the potential is rather small? 

Well I didn’t call it potentially confusing. I agree it would not confuse anyone.

I don’t see any problem with the Ecuador hed either.  Now the Coin change one; I can’t get even one meaning out of it, much less multiple ones.

"don’t see any problem with the Ecuador hed either.”

It could be mischievously interpreted to mean that Ecuador had declared the volcano to be alert.