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Comment by atomwaffel | Hacker News Reader

As I feel incompetent to comment on the article's content, I'll be glad to start a thread on the linguistics of that car crash of a headline. It took me three or four fresh starts to parse it correctly. The linguistic term for this is garden path sentence[1][2] and it's such a good one that it makes me wonder if it's deliberate.

Even just some small adjustments would make it more readable: "Japanese pictures may show melted fuel from Fukushima for the first time."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldT2g2qDQNQ

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Melted Fukushima fuel photographed for the first time.

First photos of melted Fukushima fuel.

If you take away the tentativeness of "may", "likely", etc., you can make the sentence much easier to read. I wouldn't mind a slight lack of qualifiers as long as the whole thing is not too linkbaity and the content puts the qualifiers back where they belong.

Good point, those are definitely easier to read, although in this age of clickbait I give them credit for admitting a degree of uncertainty right in the headline.

Melted Fukushima fuel likely photographed for the first time :)

The second one would never fly as a news headline, even though I agree it's clear, readable and descriptive. The Bloomberg News style guide probably specifies that headlines should have a verb in them, and maybe encourages the active mood which would rule out your first suggestion too. Looking at the front page of bloomberg.com, the same pattern is universal with one exception: "Trump, Russia and the Early Murmurs About Pardons". Looking further down, their opinion pieces seem to be allowed a wider variety of styles.

You have to say it's Japan, though. Otherwise people may hear "Fukushima" and think it's in Germany.

The only real difference from your version to the titles is -ese on Japan. 'Likely' is a fine substitute for 'may show', from my perspective.

The OP may have started to read it as "Japan (noun) pictures (verb) likely (adjective)...". Changing "Japan" to "Japanese" and "likely" to "may" eliminates that as a possible interpretation.

That's exactly what I did. I think my brain even went on to read "show" as a noun, and "may" would have prevented that. Title Case Didn't Help Much Either.

Besides that, I'm not sure either "Japan" or "Japanese" is really necessary, because "Fukushima" makes it clear that the pictures are from Japan.

The nation of Japan imagines, for the first time, Fukushima fuel that has probably been melted for display purposes.

Which is nice.

When you usually write headlines, you go for the most concise or compact version possible to conserve space.

Even though I'm a non native speaker, I haven't experienced any difficulties parsing and processing this headline. I am not sure what part of it that got you off balance.

For me it was the fact that 'pictures', 'show' and 'fuel' can be either verbs or nouns. Since I first parsed 'pictures' as a verb, it went downhill pretty fast.

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