Kelly Parnell found a lovely headline mistake at a page owned by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (the link will come later): it said:
Driver in fatal hit-and-run allegedly turns self in
The wrong place for that awkward police-talk modifier, of course (Language Log has discussed such things before; see e.g. this post by Arnold Zwicky). As Kelly noted, what was alleged was that the hapless individual had been involved in a fatal hit and run (a bad thing), not that she turned herself in (a relatively good thing). It's absolutely certain that she turned herself in — she was remanded to the county jail. The clearly ill-chosen modifier placement in the original headline got me thinking about just how many places there were to try:
Alleged driver in fatal hit-and-run turns self in
(Was she really at the wheel?)
Driver allegedly in fatal hit-and-run turns self in
(Was her vehicle ever really there?)
Driver in allegedly fatal hit-and-run turns self in
(Did anybody really die?)
Driver in fatal alleged hit-and-run turns self in
(Was it really a hit-and-run?)
Driver in fatal hit-and-run allegedly turns self in
(Did she really show up at the police station?)
Driver in fatal hit-and-run turns alleged self in
(Was it really herself that she turned in?)
Kelly and I were crestfallen when we found the people at the paper had fixed their error within a few hours (though not soon enough: as of January 13 searching on Google News for "allegedly turns" would still find the original). The headline as revised at the newspaper's site makes perfectly good sense now. But I wonder if you can guess which of the above possibilities it was actually changed to?
You can find out by going to the page in question and simply reading the new headline.
Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at January 13, 2007 12:47 AM