French push bottles up German rear
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
French push bottles up German rear is a celebrated, but apocryphal, ambiguous headline supposedly printed by a British newspaper during the First World War. [1]
As intended by the writer, the headline suggests that a French attack had choked German supply lines, that is, ‘push’ is a noun and ‘bottles’ is a verb.
However, the headline can also be parsed construing ‘push’ as a verb and ‘bottles’ as a plural noun.
Life imitated art with a Second World War headline: "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up German Rear".[2]
[edit] References
- ^ Heads you win: The readers' editor on the art of the headline writer
- ^ Fritz Spiegl What The Papers Didn't Mean to Say Scouse Press, Liverpool, 1965
