Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Parse this!

Just came across this headline:
Mildly ill child care changes to in-home service
 It gardenpathed me at first:  [Mildly ill child care changes].  Then I got that "changes" was a verb, but even without that it's fun to come up with readings...

1 comment:

Ellen K. said...

I got "changes" as a verb no problem, but I'm having trouble shaking the notion that the child care is ill, even though that doesn't make sense. Maybe because it makes more sense grammatically (to me) than reading it with the presumably correct meaning, "child care for mildly ill children". Wait... maybe it's "[mildly ill child] care", rather than, as I was thinking "[mildly ill] childcare". And thus the space between child and care.