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Big Dairy is being upped by controversial new milk shakes.
by DavidSJ 9y ago
Big Dairy is being upped by controversial new milk shakes.
- logicallee 9y agoyou're making a pretty low-quality joke but this headline really shouldn't have made it past the editors' desk in its current form because it's simply too confusing. (Because the term "milk shakes" makes it a garden path sentence.[1]) It's obviously "deliberate" but simply too hard to parse. Personally if I really insisted on the pun I would have put an extraneous comma that disambiguates: >Controversial New Milk, Shakes Up Big Dairy That still has the pun in it but at least would be readable. If people wonder why there's an unnecessary comma there they might realize the pun. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence - which includes "When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing." Certainly true for me.
- numbsafari 9y agoOr maybe it’s super clever SEO.
- petecox 9y ago'milkshake' is a compound noun, or at least Firefox's spell checker doesn't insist on hyphenation. To 'shake up' is perfectly idiomatic. Using 'up' as a standalone verb is less common and should be your cue.
- always_good 9y agoThat's irrelevant. Like "the old man the boat," the combination makes it hard to parse. The cue is that you get to "the boat" and realize you misinterpreted it. The point was not that it was impossible to understand.
- DavidSJ 9y agoIt was a low-quality joke, I agree (most of my jokes are). But I actually was trying to point out that it’s a garden path sentence.
- logicallee 9y agoSorry, I was unnecessarily harsh :)
- DavidSJ 9y agoNo problem at all. Have a good day.