CIA leak jury prospects’ politics under scrutiny
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/01/15/libby.trial.ap/index.html
Am I just thinking too hard, or is this a real beast of a headline?
It’s a crappy headline. As I understand it, it means that someone is scrutinizing the politics of prospective jurors in the CIA leak case. Headlines like this drove me out of newspapering. (Not really, but they didn’t help any!)
Yeah, that’s a rough one alright. I’m a little amazed by the topic, too.
Jury reporting always seems to include double negatives, and you have to be a lawyer to figure out which is Roe and which is Wade, etc.
Now that I’ve read the article, I can see what the headline supposedly means. I guess they didn’t have enough space for “Politics of Prospective Jurors For CIA Leak Case Under Scrutiny.” Because that adds 8 letters, which I guess can be critical.
Bet it was fun drafting that jury questionnaire, though.
I don’t understand the confusion.
Is there some ambiguity that I’m to thick to get? It seemed clear at a glance to me.
Maybe we need a Man Helps Dog Bite Victim thread. 
I remember seing a piece years back about a NY Daily News headline on one of tobacco heiress Doris Duke’s many weddings: Duke Heiress Rewed
If I’d been married and divorce as many times as she, I probably would have “rewed” the day too! 
Don’t be such a tease – how the heck is this sentence being parsed?
No matter how long I look at it, it remains obstinately clear and unremarkable. 
LINK PORN SLAY TO EYE SLICE MOB
-Dave Barry
Hey, at least they got the apostrophe in the right place.
Larry Mudd, does the headline mean, “Man helps dog to bite victim”, or “Man helps victim of dog-bite”? This is a classic case where a compound adjective, “dog bite”, needs a hyphen for clarity: “Man helps dog-bite victim”.
Ooh, there’s some irony, me bringing in my own confusing ambiguity.
The ambiguity in Polycarp’s well-worn example is clear and amusing. By “this sentence,” I meant the headline which is the subject of this thread, which I parsed without difficulty as the CNN Online editor intended, and have still been unable to parse any other way.
Since this thread exists, I know that there must be some tricky little thing in the headline that I’m not seeing, but it remains straightforward and unambiguous to me.
I feel like the everybody’s younger brother, saying “Okay, ‘I AM SOFA KING WEE TODD ID.’ What? What’s so funny? ‘I AM SOFA KING WEE TODD ID.’ I don’t get it. Why are you all laughing so hard?”
Help a brother out.
Oh, I and totally meant to write ‘to thick’ up there. I’m all hip and ironic like that.
I can’t parse it for you, because I can’t parse it at all. I read it several times and simply couldn’t tell what words modified what other words.
It took me a while, in fact, to figure out that they hadn’t conjugated “leak” incorrectly; I kept trying to have the CIA leak something. Then I got confused over the poor jury’s prospects. What prospects does a jury have?
I just really couldn’t understand it at all. Kudos to you that you could. The rest of us were just sitting here saying, ‘I AM SOFA KING WEE TODD ID.’
Simple, change the headline:
Shylocks Sniff Spy Spew Solons’ Sentiments
My favorite will always be “Rosie weds longtime girlfriend, slams Bush”
I must be the Queen of Understanding Stupid Headlines, Larry Mudd, because I understood it the first time I read it, too. It definitely ain’t purdy, but it says all the right stuff.