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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is the title extremely confusing? Why do writers do this?

For me it's kinda like those visual illusions that look like a dog or a duck but never both. When I first saw this title I was like "the heck is that word salad?" but now after reading the article I can toggle it from making sense to not making sense. Duck to dog and back again.

Postulating as to why writers do this generally - Imagine you work in Garmin PR and you've been looking at this story, thinking about this story, sending and receiving emails about this story, having meetings about this story, etc, for way too long. It suffuses into the tissue of your brain. The title now makes perfect sense to you and you're so entrenched that you can't see it that other way.

Finally, it's Friday. 4pm. Before a long weekend. You're going on an amazing trip to the mountains and you're excited to not think about marine GPS systems for ~72 hours. You've got the post scheduled. Anton, your coworker, pings you and says "hey, should we set up some time to talk about potentially reworking this title? I showed the piece to a friend and they didn't 'get' the title." You sigh, but dutifully pull up Anton's calendar and start scrolling, only to realize he's taking all of next week off and the week after you're going to a conference to extoll the virtues of marine GPS systems and the week after that he's going to a conference to extoll the virtues of marine GPS systems and you're just tired of all this, so you click the 'thumbs up' emoji, close your laptop, and the whole thing just vanishes from everyone's mind. It's the weekend, baby!

It's written by the Garmin PR team - their headlines are as intuitive as their device UIs!

This article is much better: https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/inspire/life/how-a-fisherman...

I understood it first time. What was confusing to you?

Ghost Boat - Either the craft didn't exist or it has no pilot

With Garmin GPS - okay, it's the no pilot case

Leads - Okay, they followed it to a waypoint or they discovered it motoring aimlessly

Father-Son Duo - these two were the rescuers, cool

To Man overboard - okay, pilot fell off the boat

Definitely clear to me on first read and enough for me to click through.

as a non-native English speaker, it initially read as (something boat) causes (father/son) to (go overboard)

I'm not a native speaker either and I think what threw me off was the "Man Overboard" bit, which is usually used as a "maritime call" so to speak. So in other words, it wasn't clear to me who was overboard, the father-son duo or somebody else. What I think the title should have been is "Ghost Boat with Garmin GPS Leads Father-Son Duo to a Man Overboard", notice "a man overboard" to clearly indicate that they were led to someone who was overboard.

It’s not your fault: the title is very confusing to me and my mother tongue is English. Perhaps finding it confusing is a sign that your English is very good.

Fair enough. I can see how you could have reached that conclusion. I suppose it's written for a native speaker.

For what it's worth, ChatGPT "comprehends" it correctly so perhaps one day we can have a headline auto-expander.

I'm a native english speaker but don't really have a marine background. I also read it as the father/son somehow going overboard.

Made perfect sense to me, but I think if I didn't already know "Man-overboard" as a single term made up of two words, I might've assumed "overboard" modified something else like "leads" or "duo", and then it would've been quite confusing.

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