This is the one that is ambiguous.

Posted June 3rd, 2010 by Mike Lawson

This has kind of been driving me nuts the past few weeks.  Every morning I pass a plant nursery that has a rather large sign out front that says “HUGE TREE SALE.”  And every morning I’m disturbed by the ambiguity of it.  What is huge?  The trees?  The sale?

I guess it’s more funny that disturbing.

I really doubt that anyone is walking into the nursery and is disappointed when he finds that the sale is large and the trees are just normal-sized. But I really get a kick out of syntactically ambiguous statements.

I listen to The Savage Love Podcast, and too often callers call in and state that they have a “big [FILL IN THE BODY PART] fetish” and I laugh because I imagine some guy getting his rocks off on extremely large feet.

I really like in the evening news when the talking heads are reporting on stolen items getting recovered and say something like, “the stolen vehicle was found by the 101 in Scottsdale.”  It makes me think, “good job, 101 for doing your civic duty and finding a stolen car!”

And newspaper headlines are notorious for this…basically because they omit qualifying information that makes the headline sensible.  I read The Columbia Journalism Review’s “The Lower Case” column and they collect funny ambiguous headlines (like Squad helps dog bite victim or my favorite Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge).

When I was telling my buddy Drew about the “Huge Tree Sale” sign he made a good point.  He said, “I don’t really think that “Extremely Large Sale on Ordinary Sized Trees’ would fit on a sign.”  Touché.  I guess I just have to let this one go.