Monday, April 29, 2013

From what planet comes this one?

This headline, that is, or rather large caption to a front-page photo in today's Wall Street Journal (not onine):

Shooting Mars Swearing-in Ceremony

The photo [scroll down] is of a man lying flat with a gun pointed at his head. I did wonder whether someone was shooting an action movie set on the red planet. Its sandwiching between two gerunds (or a gerund and a gerund phrase, or whatever) added to the red fog.

Add this to my collection of headlines in which it's hard to pluck the verb from a dense mesh of (often monosyllabic) ambidextrous verb-nouns:

Verbal noun mashup dazes headline reader
Newspaper taxes readers' decoding chops
Five noun run spurs brain freeze

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