When I first read this headline from the Arizona Republic, I misunderstood it completely. My original understanding of the headline was that a man was suspected of firing a gun at an officer who was in custody. Then I thought, "There's no way I read that correctly." I had to read it again in order to realize that what the reporter meant was that the man who was suspected of firing a gun at the officer was put into custody. Thus, as this headline shows, word order in a headline can change its intended meaning and confuse (some) readers.
2 comments:
So glad you posted that! I thought the same thing when I saw it in print.
Oh -- I do want to point out, though, that that's the reporter's name and not likely to be the name of the person who wrote the hed.
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