Open Letters
May 15th, 2009
Girl Friday
Friday Refrains
Refrains, Discreet
Discrete Objects
Objects to Change
Change Jingles
Jingles Campaign
Campaign March
March Born
Borne Aloft
A Loft Garret
Garret Retreats
Retreats Advances
Ad Infinitum
May 18th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Oooh ooooh I got two more!
Feminist Issue
Trying Fiction
I think “Garret Retreats” is my new favorite.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:19 am
(Though I realize “issue” is just two different nouns and not one usage turning it into a verb or other part of speech….)
May 18th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
Yeah, we’re a little loose with the rules around here, n.b. “aloft” and “a loft.”
thus also,
Finding Faults
Redeeming Virtues
Calculated Abandon
Turning Point
none of which has the elegance of Miss America or Enduring Freedom/Enduring Love
May 19th, 2009 at 1:01 am
El Brujo came up with one tonight—the title of his forthcoming autobiographical novel, he avows: Peter’s Out! Which if I’m not mistaken has THREE meanings (but you have to discount the apostrophe for two of them).
Then I dug up another from days of yore, which actually had me laughing into my spinach ravioli because I thought it was so funny, but guess what? I ALREADY FORGOT IT. Depleted estrogen is making it really hard to play this game. Oh well—we’ll always have “British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands.”
May 19th, 2009 at 1:24 am
Hey, this has a name—ambiguous syntactic constituents!
You know, like how if time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. And “Kids Make Nutritious Snacks”! But sadly these headlines are, according to snopes.com, not real.
Also once there was a reason someone gave, on the Wallace list, for always using the Oxford comma, claiming that he’d actually seen this book dedication: “To my parents, God and Ayn Rand.”
May 19th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Having gotten three meanings into “art found wanting” I was pretty proud of that one.
And then there’s the book mentioned in a New York Times article about conspicuous consumerism “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.”
May 19th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Also yielded by the j-list this morning, this headline “Gingrich: Pelosi Should Be Suspended, Probed.” Ugh.
So, yeah, they’re everywhere.
June 1st, 2009 at 9:55 pm
current favorite, however, may be, per William Gaddis Agape Agape.