Continuing the discussion from More misread headlines:
A “crash blossom” is a headline with a funny double meaning. Unfortunately in real life, these are rare. So here’s a thread to make up all sorts of crash blossoms. There has to be a funny/absurd reading, and a plausible newsworthy reading.
Airline Drops Pilot, Crew after Mid-Air Incident
Library Bans Graphic Novels
Umpires Call Strike
Military to Nuke Turkey for Thanksgiving
~Max
Why are these called “crash blossoms”? I would guess that “crash blossom” is itself an example of the phenomenon, but I can’t think of any meaning for that phrase, much less two.
The name crash blossom was inspired by an August 2009 headline in *Japan Today* that read:
Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms
Notable for not really having a double meaning that makes sense, but still constructed in a way to make the reader wonder what JAL crash blossoms are.
The details of who the young woman who played the violin was, why she was now blossoming and what her link to the Japan Airlines crash was can be found in the link.
Oh my god what a subject. It was advocated by a man named Daniel/Dan/Danny Bloom, who I was well acquainted with years before he came up with it. He’s an interesting trainwreck, a sad internet crackpot who’s father worked at Tuft’s University and got him in there and signs just about everything with the fact that he graduated from there in 1971.
He was hugely into self-promotion. Anytime a concept entered his head he would head of to every online source he could find that mentioned something related to it that had a comment area and give sermons about it. He pushes until he occasionally finds someone who is a pushover.
I first encountered him on a forum for people who are interested in/use ebooks and ebook readers. He had read somewhere that reading ebooks was a bad thing and he was determined to stop people from doing it and made himself an annoying troll on that forum. Nobody would agree with him so he started creating obvious sock puppets that did. That forum had the same intolerance for socks that we do here. I kept finding and reporting them (he had very obvious “tells”), he kept replacing them. In one short thread with no more than 50 posts he was SEVEN of the thread members. (Here is a thread on the forum started by one of his earliest socks.)
Related to that, he wanted people to keep reading daily paper newspapers instead of reading their news online. And he decided that since people humourously called paper mail “snailmail”, newspapers should be called “snailpapers”. He advocated for that everwhere. He even wrote a “song” about it and paid some guy to put it to music and sing it. (He mentioned the Drudge Report in the “song” and sent the link to Matt Drudge hoping that he would promote it.)
(Snailpaper bonus)
He had another obsession. Trying to get people to immediately start building polar cities. He was vocal enough to get some people (including a NYT writer) to mention him on that.
Another sad/funny story. He lived in Taiwan and once heard someone use a word that he had never heard before. Someone explained to him that it was a greeting. He decided that the people of Taiwan didn’t use that word enough and that must be corrected. So he went on a campaign to get the people of Taiwan to start using the word more. He eventually browbeat some poor school administrator to show a video from him to the whole school, an elderly American instructing Taiwanese children on a Taiwanese word that they needed to use more.
I expect that his video to them was a bit similar to this video he made to be shown to the graduating class of Tufts in 2099:
So, “crash blossom” is one of the terms that he pushed and pushed and pushed for that somewhat stuck, unlike snailpaper. (If you’ve ever heard the term "
Google Search", that’s his, too.)
(Last should be “cli-fi”, not Google Search.)
OK, a Library bans an entire category of book.
Sorry - I don’t get the second meaning. 
There was an English politician called Michael Foot. who headed a political party (Labour.)
If he had been appointed to a disarmament organisation, the headline would have been:
Foot heads arms body. 
Graphic novels about library bans?
Library Bans Graphic Novels
The library bans certain novels with particularly graphic content.
Foot heads arms body.
That’s the spirit!
Speaking of which,
San Diego Loses Spirit
~Max
There’s a famous WW2 example:
Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans
Female student beats off rapist attacker.
(this one is true-- I saw it in the student newspaper on a college campus ,1980 or 81)
Just recently, the merger of two energy companies in the UK led to the headline
Octopus Buys Bulb.
That sounds familiar… I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of the many places he’s managed to get himself banned from.
Back on topic, not quite the same, but during the Montana senate race between incumbent Conrad Burns and challenger Jon Tester, I saw bumper stickers that said, simply, “FIRE BURNS”.
That guy sounds like Archimedes Plutonium or Kurt Stocklmeir from the Usenet days.
My contribution to the thread would be the catchy, but inaccurate Variety headline “Hix Nix Stix Pix.”
I remember a viral email from the 1990s that listed a bunch of these. Who knows if they were real. But a couple I remember are:
British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
That’s a single entendre, though. If you read the story, that’s exactly what it’s about.
“I did not forsee her breaking a rib while filming a sex scene.”
“I did not see her breaking a rib while having an orgasm.”
“Crash blossoms” aren’t about deliberate double entendre, it is headlines that can inadvertently be interpreted in more thaon one way
Eh, the real story there is that she did, in fact, break a rib while filming a sex scene, and that’s there however you interpret it. Whether the reporter personally witnessed or anticipated that is beside the point.
You really don’t seem to understand the concept of a “crash blossom”. It is about the humerous ambiguity of the headline, not about how it fits with the contents of the article after having read it.
I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. A crash blossom is a pseudopun or a semientendre. It has two readings but only one is meaningful, the other nonsense or incomprehensible.
The namesake of this type of headline is illustrative: “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms.” It has only one meaning. Namely, that the violinist linked to the crash is now blossoming. Crash blossoms aren’t a thing and to crash blossom is equally meaningless. You can see what I mean by pseudopunous headline. Most of the examples given are just punny headlines.
This:
I think is a genuine crash blossom. The only plausible reading is that Foot is heading an arms body while the second reading is just funny nonsense.
Anyway, I’m enjoying the thread so please do go on.