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As a non-native speaker this headline took me way too many attempts to parse correctly. For anyone wondering the same, it's meant to be read as: ACLU exposes F
by pluma 10y ago
As a non-native speaker this headline took me way too many attempts to parse correctly. For anyone wondering the same, it's meant to be read as:
ACLU exposes Facebook and Twitter for selling user data to a surveillance company
The way I read it the first few times I thought they sold user data of a company, for surveillance.
- dredmorbius 10y agoAs a native speaker, it's a poorly written headline. One term for this form of misleading / confusing sentence (and especially headline) is a "crash blossom". http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/fun-with-crash-blossoms http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/fun-with-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity
- pluma 10y agoI think in this case it's made worse by the wording "selling X Y" as a substitute for "selling Y to X" being relatively rare and in this case both X and Y being compound words (surveillance company and user data). So not only is it a crash blossom in the sense that it's ambiguous whether it's [surveillance] [company user data], [surveillance company] [user data] or [surveillance company user] [data], but it could also be read as [surveillance company user data]. There are at least four possible ways to attempt to parse the sentence and the only one that makes sense relies on unusual phrasing.