Parse error

It took me forever to parse this Reuters headline: “Gay equals fourth-fastest 100 after near miss.”

Is it about equal rights for gay people? Are there a hundred of them that are really fast? Did some historian just figure out that gay people with equal rights just hit the hundred-member milestone and that this is some kind of speed record? Were they really close, nearly lost it, but then made it?

Oh. Wait. The article is about the Olympics:

World champion Tyson Gay equaled the fourth fastest 100 meters of all time when he clocked an American record 9.77 seconds in the quarter-finals at the U.S. Olympic trials on Saturday.

Whoops. Does anybody else have this kind of problem figuring out what headlines mean sometimes?

June 29th, 2008 by jon / 1 Comment / Trackback