TERSE LINES FLUMMOX ME

[muckefuck]

Nothing can make me feel my parser is broken like a news headline. I sometimes wonder if my brain works so differently from that of the target reader that I'm the only who's baffled by journalists' stabs at brevity. Here's tonight's puzzler. Do me a favour and guess what it means before you check your answer at the BBC page where I found it.

Tube death team to brief family

Comments

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

Context Uber Alles

You would have registered "Loop Killer Cops to Meet Victim's Kin" for example. Tube Death? Here, that's Terri Schiavo.

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

I was thinking it was a team of people who went around killing people with tubes. Like, big ones. That hurt, and kill, and stuff.

"Sorry, Mrs. Goldman, but little Billy has to die." "Can't you wait until he cleans his room?!?"

[goreism.livejournal.com]

I think you can escape with low-degree flummoxing on that one, just by virtue of the fact that most of the other ways to parse it are ludicrous.

Though it might have helped that I read about this a few hours ago, headlines being highly context-dependent.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Without looking at the article or previous comments on this entry: I'll guess that "brief" is the verb, so it expands to something like "The team which investigated deaths on the recent tubs strikes is to brief [convey information to] the family of a victim".

[keyne.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's how I read it.

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

Actually, this one made perfect sense to me. It obviously helps if you know that "tube" means "underground" and have followed British news over the past few weeks.

Now, Chinese headlines... those are tough. All those two-character words which get reduced to one character... ouch.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It obviously helps if you know that "tube" means "underground" and have followed British news over the past few weeks.

Thing is I've done those things. Once I saw "Brazilian man" in the lead paragraph, it all fell into place. But shortening "team investigating a death in the tube" to "tube death team" seems boundlessly perverse. My first parsing was the same as aadroma's: A team trained to kill with tubes has been dispatched to the household of a brief family (possibly consisting of only two or three members).