:unintended novelties

Under “Latest News” on CNN.com one morning, I read the above headline and thought Wow! I can’t believe CNN would include their opinion of someone’s beauty in a headline, that’s unusual. Then directly below this headline I noticed that on the the list of “most popular videos” was the same piece, titled this: “Nude models on strike.” Oops. I think I interpreted the meaning of “striking” as “beautiful” partly because the word was describing a model. Had the headline been “Striking Garbage Men: ‘It’s a tough job’” I think I may have been less likely to make this mistake.

Also a likely contributor, I rarely (if ever) though of the word “striking” when trying to describe someone’s appearance until a few months ago, when we did an exercise in Rochelle’s creative writing course one day where the class listed as many possible ways to say pretty/beautiful, and someone put ’striking’ on the list. I know it became a highly activated word in my mind for sometime afterward, because I caught myself using it rather frequently thereafter.

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Here’s a case of linguistic ambiguity from a Reuters Headline last week, which I completely misunderstood and which took a long time to repair.

Normally, I think of the Coastguard as a unit that defends a country’s borders. When I hear of a military-like unit “striking”, I think of an airstrike, with bombs, guns, and damage.  When I read the headline, I was surprised to see that the Coastguard had begun conducting combat operations. It wasn’t until I got to the phrase “national minimum wage” in the 6th paragraph that the meaning finally jumped out at me!  This was a story about the Coastguard choosing to stop working for a while to bargain for higher pay.

I think this ambiguity was especially difficult to resolve because I didn’t believe the Coastguard was allowed to strike - in a work stoppage way. This was a story from Britain - maybe the rules are different in the US?

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