Confusing headlines

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ratammer
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by ratammer »

quinterbeck wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:32 am I know very few Brits who still use the term "chemist('s)" for the local dispenser/ary. They're nearly always called pharmacies nowadays.
Where in Britain? I'm in East London and would only ever use "chemist" - I've only heard "pharmacy" from foreigners.
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quinterbeck
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by quinterbeck »

flicky wrote: Tue Apr 27, 2021 12:26 pm
quinterbeck wrote: Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:32 am I know very few Brits who still use the term "chemist('s)" for the local dispenser/ary. They're nearly always called pharmacies nowadays.
Where in Britain? I'm in East London and would only ever use "chemist" - I've only heard "pharmacy" from foreigners.
East Midlands. However my mum is a Pharmacist, so perhaps I'm not the best source for the average British usage. I'd say it's definitely standard for official usage, e.g. in pharmacy names, NHS written material.

Ngrams puts chemist and pharmacy about equal in current usage, with pharmacy on the up. But I suppose the corpus leans official rather than colloquial.
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alynnidalar
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by alynnidalar »

White Departing Civil Rights Post To Become Interim Detroit Police Chief

(“White” is a surname. Of a black man in this case, for maximum irony)
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Raphael
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Raphael »

From a tweet by the AFP:

Vietnam discovers new hybrid virus variant: state media
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Raphael
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Raphael »

Oh, and another one, from Politico:

How Harry Reid, a Terrorist Interrogator and the Singer From Blink-182 Took UFOs Mainstream
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by zompist »

Not a headline, but it took a moment for this one to parse:
BBC wrote:Hopes a meeting of leaders could smooth some of the rough edges from the debate have been dashed.
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Pabappa »

Raphael wrote: Sat May 29, 2021 2:24 pm From a tweet by the AFP:

Vietnam discovers new hybrid virus variant: state media
reminds me of an article title i saw once about five years ago ...

What ISIS really wants — the Atlantic

but i held off on typing that up here because the article had a normal headline, and what i saw was just an auto-generated summary by an RSS or some other type of feed bot. This was a chat room, so I said, "ISIS wants the Atlantic?" and my comment got added to the list of comments worth preserving.
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Pabappa
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Pabappa »

i guess sports team names can be amusing, if not confusing, if you dont know that theyre sports teams:

Bears Approved to Build Stadium by Arlington Heights Board

Not really in the same category as the garden paths, because essentially none of the people reading the headline will think it is actually about the animals, but this at least makes for an interesting mental image.
bradrn
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by bradrn »

Not a headline, but I found myself pretty confused by Raphael’s vent:
Raphael wrote: Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:19 am About 11 months after I got my new mouse, it's already showing first signs of the things that made me put the previous mouse in a drawer.
…until I realised that they were probably talking about a computer mouse rather than a live one.
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Man in Space
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Man in Space »

bradrn wrote: Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:00 pm Not a headline, but I found myself pretty confused by Raphael’s vent:
Raphael wrote: Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:19 am About 11 months after I got my new mouse, it's already showing first signs of the things that made me put the previous mouse in a drawer.
…until I realised that they were probably talking about a computer mouse rather than a live one.
Huh. Had you not said anything I wouldn’t have thought twice about it—the animal sense never crossed my mind.
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Rounin Ryuuji
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Rounin Ryuuji »

bradrn wrote: Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:00 pm Not a headline, but I found myself pretty confused by Raphael’s vent:
Raphael wrote: Wed Jun 23, 2021 10:19 am About 11 months after I got my new mouse, it's already showing first signs of the things that made me put the previous mouse in a drawer.
…until I realised that they were probably talking about a computer mouse rather than a live one.
I remember having a similar reaction.
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Creyeditor »

I misread "mouse" for "house" until you put in in the drawer.
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by alice »

https://nation.cymru/news/gb-news-troun ... paw-patrol

"five times fewer"? Why not just say "one fifth as many"?
Self-referential signatures are for people too boring to come up with more interesting alternatives.
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Travis B. »

alice wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 12:29 pm https://nation.cymru/news/gb-news-troun ... paw-patrol

"five times fewer"? Why not just say "one fifth as many"?
Things like "five times fewer" always confuse me, as how can something be five times less than something else, unless you are comtrasting how much less two different things are compared to some other greater thing.
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alice
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by alice »

Travis B. wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 1:13 pm
alice wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 12:29 pm https://nation.cymru/news/gb-news-troun ... paw-patrol

"five times fewer"? Why not just say "one fifth as many"?
Things like "five times fewer" always confuse me, as how can something be five times less than something else, unless you are comtrasting how much less two different things are compared to some other greater thing.
It's like using "n times more" to mean, incorrectly, "n times as many", which really annoys me.
Self-referential signatures are for people too boring to come up with more interesting alternatives.
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by KathTheDragon »

alice wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 2:17 pm
Travis B. wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 1:13 pm
alice wrote: Mon Jun 28, 2021 12:29 pm https://nation.cymru/news/gb-news-troun ... paw-patrol

"five times fewer"? Why not just say "one fifth as many"?
Things like "five times fewer" always confuse me, as how can something be five times less than something else, unless you are comtrasting how much less two different things are compared to some other greater thing.
It's like using "n times more" to mean, incorrectly, "n times as many", which really annoys me.
What is it supposed to mean then?
bradrn
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by bradrn »

A truly amazing one:

Rust on horse floats. Is it a problem?

Explanation:
More: show
From here. Apparently there is a thing called a ‘horse float’, which you use to transport horses. Thus: is it problematic to transport horses in a rusty float?

And if you must know, I was actually searching for the floating-point exponentiation operator in the Rust programming language. My search was: ‘rust power of float’.
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Travis B.
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Travis B. »

bradrn wrote: Tue Jun 29, 2021 12:28 am A truly amazing one:

Rust on horse floats. Is it a problem?

Explanation:
More: show
From here. Apparently there is a thing called a ‘horse float’, which you use to transport horses. Thus: is it problematic to transport horses in a rusty float?

And if you must know, I was actually searching for the floating-point exponentiation operator in the Rust programming language. My search was: ‘rust power of float’.
I was even more confused because they're not called "horse floats" here in the US.
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Ennadinut'a gaare d'ate eetatadi siiman.
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bradrn
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by bradrn »

Seen on Hacker News:

‘Problematic stuff’: death, memory and the interpretation of cached objects
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Ares Land
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Re: Confusing headlines

Post by Ares Land »

bradrn wrote: Wed Jun 30, 2021 10:14 am Seen on Hacker News:

‘Problematic stuff’: death, memory and the interpretation of cached objects
Which is worse?

(I think cache is worse. But I work in IT.)
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