According to a BBC News story today:
Former cabinet minister Hazel Blears' car has been attacked while she was out canvassing voters.
I wonder whether the car fiddled its expenses. Sorry, I mean her expenses...
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1 week ago
5 comments:
It's not really ambiguous, though, is it? I don't think anyone would misinterpret this headline in the way you suggest.
No, I don't think anyone would misinterpret this headline. But it is still grammatically ambiguous, as its structure allows for two different interpretations. It's best to avoid grammatical ambiguity in headline writing - or rather, it's easier to avoid grammatical ambiguity than it is to predict how people will interpret an ambiguous sentence.
It might be ambiguous, if you work really hard at it. How else would you put it in a headline? Car of Ex-minister Blear attacked? That's awkward.
The way I figure it is this: either most of your readership will know who Hazel Blears is, or they won't. If it's the former, you can just run with "Hazel Blears' car attacked"; if it's the latter, then "Former minister's car attacked" will do.
I don't even see the ambiguity. The pragmatics really makes it impossible, even though I have no idea who Blear is and my immediate thought was Blair had been misspelled.
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