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Furthermore James Brown shouldn't be "sorry", he should be horsewhipped, but that's getting away from the immediate linquistic subject under discussion. My personal criticism of the headline is that the story is not about a "race row", it's about a "race insult" – the "n" word (not that the BBC story tells you that, strangely). The correct structure falls out without too much effort. Because of the named entities and collocations involved, we know that 'Ben Douglas' is a unit, 'James Brown' is a unit, 'race row' is a unit, and that 'Ben Douglas Bafta' cannot form a unit. This crash blossom wasn't as bad as it could have been. (or maybe "Bafta" binds to the left rather than the right).] So the syntactic relationship between "row" and "hairdresser" is tighter than the relationship between "hairdresser" and "James Brown". [(myl) But then you'd be parsing it wrong! In British Headlinese, 'X row Y" means "the Y involved in a controversy concerning X". If there'd been a comma after "row," I think it would have been a lot more parsable… Filed by Mark Liberman under Headlinese, Language and the media.I think I'd have read it correctly without the names.
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I didn't know the story and, thinking someone called Ben Douglas must have provoked a controversy about race by winning a Bafta, struggled on first reading to incorporate hairdressing or the Godfather of Soul into the train of associations.
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It's intelligible once you know the story: a hairdresser called James Brown caused a controversy by using racial insults to Ben Douglas at the Bafta awards ceremony and has apologised. That's eight nouns in a row, four of them coming in the names of two people's I'd not previously heard of. I usually have no trouble decoding these but this latest BBC example challenged me: Ben Douglas Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown 'sorry'. Ian Preston reports this British headline word pile construction noun phrase length gem: " Ben Douglas Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown 'sorry'".