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CalRoberttoday at 11:20 AM2 repliesview on HN

I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this. "Steve Wozniak cheered" makes it sound like he did the cheering. But the practice of removing verbs from headlines makes this more ambiguous. "Car collides with bridge" is not a grammatically correct sentence but a perfectly normal headline.

But in this case, "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI" _is_ a grammatically correct sentence, which means that Wozniak did the cheering, which may be the source of confusion. Or, perhaps it means not that he vocally cheered, but was cheered up emotionally.


Replies

nvme0n1p1today at 11:39 AM

English isn't ambiguous here either. It's the fault of journalists who have this weird obsession with removing as many words as possible from headlines.

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xxstoday at 11:38 AM

>I wonder if other languages are less ambiguous about this.

most are (few others I can speak). Generally, passive voice and past tense do not collide by having the exact same suffix. The fact the headline lacks a verb (when interpret correctly) doesn't help either.