Archive for Garden Path
Headline: Man who ran across Highway 85 to receive mental health resources, Mountain View police say The first two or three times I read that, I assumed there was a verb missing, and I wondered why someone would run across the freeway in order to get mental health services. Then I figured out what it […]
Another garden path sentence, this one from a TechCrunch headline: Did unicorns like Lyft and Uber wait too long? I misread the first several words of that as asking about how unicorns feel about ridesharing companies.
Turns out that although I mentioned garden-path sentences once here in passing, I’ve never really written about them. A garden-path sentence is one that initially leads the reader to parse it in one way, but turns out to be structured differently than it appeared to be. The usual example, and the first example I encountered, […]