The folks at the Language
Log blog like a good "noun pile," and so do I.
(They seem to have coined this useful term themselves; I've seen it
nowhere else, and an internet search yields no results.) I suppose a
"pure" noun pile headline would contain only nouns, like
the one pictured above, and like this one . . .
Fish foot spa virus
bombshell
--The Sun, 10/18/2011.
. . . which I love for the
surreal imagery it conjures up.
These three are all from
the BBC (!); each consists of a seven-word noun pile supported by a
single verb:
Ministers mull volcano
ash cloud flight chaos measures
--BBC News, 4/18/2010
Citizen science charts
horse chestnut tree pest spread
--BBC News 1/24/2014
Pilot Fish Project
English Channel crossing bid begins
--BBC News 8/5/2016
The champion seems to be
this
one, which even the Language Log people had trouble decoding:
Napa wildfire LNU
Lightning Complex Gamble Hennessey Fire –
August 2020
--SFGate 8/18/2020
3 comments:
When I was reading up on paraprosdokians for the joke posts I ran across garden path humor, and this one stuck with me "The old man the boat".
That's all I have, but it seemed sort of related.
Now you know who's writing Biden's speeches.
Before this scrolls off the front page let me say that the title you wrote is a masterful noun pile collection, fer sher.
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