9 ms·
Off topic, but this headline is a good example of a crash blossom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sy
by nmyk 11y ago
Off topic, but this headline is a good example of a crash blossom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headlines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity#In_headline...
- castis 11y agoIts awful to imagine someone was trapped in rubble by their own heartbeat.
- civilian 11y agoOr, alternatively, the heartbeat of NASA's radar found 4 men trapped in rubble?
- nsomaru 11y ago"Radar" is in the singular, so the plural "heartbeats" cannot apply to it. edit: Also, if somehow the radar had multiple heartbeats, we would have used "its heartbeats" rather than "their heartbeats." disclaimer: I am not a grammarian or a linguist (IANAGOAL?)
- eridius 11y agoThat's not the ambiguity. The ambiguity is whether the Radar found them by their heartbeats, or whether they were trapped by their heartbeats.
- sliverstorm 11y agoOr did the radar find the men, while trapped in the rubble by the men's heartbeats?
- eridius 11y agoThat doesn't work because "found 4 men" is not a modifier on "NASA's Radar". If it said "NASA's Radar Found By 4 Men Trapped In Rubble" then that would work.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoBuffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo (It's a valid sentence, honest)
- damon_c 11y agoYou did it wrong. This is just the name of the city of Buffalo over and over.
- mhurron 11y agoor the animal, or several combinations of the city and the animal. But definitely not a sentence.
- gnud 11y agoWell, I'm certainly no expert, but Internet Lore has it that any number of 'Buffalo' forms a valid sentence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...
- BuildTheRobots 11y ago(I think) if one capitalises every word, then they all have to be taken as proper nouns, rather than a mix of adjectives, nouns and verbs (as depicted in the tree diagram on the wiki page). At that point you're just failing to count properly ;)
- applecore 11y agoIndeed. Most people feel trapped, not by their own heartbeat, but by the electrical impulses that lie within their brains.