Thursday, July 13, 2006

The problem with having double meanings

Here's the problem with words having completely different meanings (especially when I'm not reading carefully).

I saw a headline on Yahoo! this morning that said:

"Man eyes free-fall from 25 miles above Earth"

I'm thinking to myself: Wow! I've got to read that! How could his eyes fall from 25 miles above Earth? How is that possible?

Easy! His eyes didn't fall to Earth. The title on the article page says "Space Diver Prepares for Big Jump". I just glanced at it, so I didn't compute that there was no possessive on the "man" part of the headline! Duh!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is a whole book on double entendre titles of newspaper articles. One of my favorites is 'Teenage Prostitution Problem is Mounting'.

Stephanie said...

Ha! That is FUNNY!