The Old New Thing

My first take was that Eve was set to speak at a school.  Then I remembered that she was a sneak and a liar and, arguably, a hoochy for messing around with that snake so it's questionable whether one could call her a lady.  Then I remembered she's been dead for quite some time so she's speaking nowhere.

its Pathetic Ray..

By reading "First Lady" 99.99% of Americans thinks about "The First Lady".

mvadu: Maybe. But note that the title says "First lady", not "First Lady". Something about a horse, uncle Jack and helping him.

Is English a great language or what?  I love it!

@mvadu:

When I read "First Lady" (capital L), of course I think of the President's wife.

When I read "First lady" (lowercase L) then I think of it along the lines of "first person", the way Raymond described. So count me in the 0.01 percent.

Of course, when you wrote it, you capitalized "Lady" too.

"First lady" isn't capitalized in the linked article.

I misread Raymonds blogpost, episode 1

The nice thing about Google News is that in the process of showing you multiple news sources, it also shows you multiple headlines for the story. Thus, crappy headlines will be easier to interpret.

As I recall, this is what YACC refers to as a shift/reduce ambiguity.

Bad luck using a language without well-defined operator precedence. Or grouping operators.

there might've been other woman who have spoken before, but this was the first lady

Ok,  how do you interpret:

First lady eats shoots and leaves

(FWIW, I read your headline the same way you did)

Tangentializing a bit, note that the link to the First Lady's bio is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/firstlady/flbio.html

Am I the only one who finds overqualification to cause excruciating mental discomfort? You're already inside the "firstlady" folder; the default "namespace" is therefore already the First Lady. It should be either firstlady/bio.html or whitehouse.gov/flbio.html.

I know this has little to do with the original topic, but Raymond has already set a precedent of silliness.

CtrlAltDelete: According to the preface of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", Douglas Adams' hobbies are: Cooking his children and leaving out commas.

I immediately read that as "a US president's wife", since I don't expect a modern-day newspaper to use the word "lady" instead of "woman".

George Jansen: YACC... You mean the old "Yet Another Compiler Compiler"?

Time Flies like an Arrow...

Hmm.  The headline seems to actually state “First lady _speaks_ at …” (which may be changed from before), which is somewhat different; that puts it more clearly into the present indicative tense, so it can't be a modifier to the noun “First lady” at the beginning of the sentence.

This is the kind of blog post that makes a grammar nazi feel all warm and fuzzy.

@daves561: I concur. It also annoys me when people do that with code. If you're already in the foo/ folder, don't name your classes FooBar.

First, you are twisted. :) Just like me.

@ mvadu, not everyone reading The Old New Thing is American.

Another possible interpretation:

After a lady speaks for the first time in Ala., the school she spoke in was hit by a tornado.

I know, the dot is required for the abbreviation of Alabama, but it's so much funnier this way...

Perhaps, instead of making fun of the headline, reading the content of the article might have cleared up any misunderstandings?

FLOTUS is beautifully unambiguous and takes up less headline space.

But, ew.

FWIW, dictionary.com says capitalization is optional.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/First%20Lady

How about "First lady to speak at devastated Ala. school"?

How about "First Lady grabs shovel, helps rebuilding of Alabama school"?

Nah, that would be wishfull thinking.

> How about "First lady to speak at devastated Ala. school"?

Brillant!

Student A: Hey, did you hear the First Lady is coming to speak at our school?

Student B: Really?  Oh, man...

PingBack from http://polymathprogrammer.com/2008/07/01/misreading-headlines/