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{{trope|wppage=Syntactic ambiguity}}
{{quote|'''Wesley''': I'm a rogue demon hunter now.
'''Cordelia''': Wow... so, what's a rogue demon?
|''[[Angel]]'', "Parting Gifts"}}
A simple statement becomes a bit of wordplay caused by an unclear use of a modifier. This is also known as a "[[wikipedia:Syntactic ambiguity|syntactic ambiguity]]" or "[http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/squinting%20construction squinting construction]".
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{{examples}}
== [[Advertising]] ==
* Invoked in an [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EipLF3jiUk ad for Wolf Insurance]; that is, an insurance company owned by a person named Wolf, serving the Lehigh Valley. It shows [[Little Red Riding Hood]] going through the forest when she hears some growling, and brandishes legal documents before continuing unmolested, "Wolf Insurance" here implying insurance ''against'' wolves.
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* ''[[The Little Rascals]]'' had a three foot man eating chicken in a freak show. It was one of the kids wearing a fake mustache, and eating from a bucket of chicken.
* ''[[Airplane!]]'' has one character speaking of a "drinking problem" while narrating a flashback, and a second later we see he in fact meant a problem with his ''ability'' to drink, namely that he was spilling the whole glass on his face.
** ''Airplane!'' used this trope for a lot of its humor:
{{quote|'''Ted:''' It's an entirely different type of flying, altogether.
'''Dr. Rumack and Randy, in unison:''' It's an entirely different type of flying.
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'''Hanging Lady:''' First time?
'''Ted:''' No, I've been nervous lots of times. }}
*** Some of these are repeated ad nauseum and it was ''awesome''.
* ''[[Animal Crackers]]'': "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I dunno."
* From ''[[The King's Speech]]'':
{{quote|'''Bertie''': (telling a story to his daughters) This was very inconvenient for him, because he loved t-t-to hold his princesses in his arms. But you can't if you're a penguin, because y-you have wings, like herrings.
'''Margaret''': Herrings don't have wings.
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* Panda: ''[[Eats Shoots and Leaves]]''.
* The [[Discworld]] book ''[[Discworld/The Truth|The Truth]]'' has a few jokes about not only ambiguous headlines, but trying to compensate for them, such as "Patrician Attacks Clerk With Knife (he had the knife, not the clerk)".
* In ''[[Blindsight]]'' by Peter Watts, a linguist intentionally uses an extremely ambiguous sentence to determine whether she's talking to an actual person or a mere syntax engine.
* In a ''[[Grail Quest Solo Fantasy]]'' game book, you enter a room containing 'a man eating plant'. The next line informs you that the plant he's eating is a carrot.
* From ''[[Nursery Crime|The Fourth Bear]]'':
{{quote|"The other three orderlies who accompanied him are critical in the hospital."
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'''Arthur:''' What's so unpleasant about being drunk?
'''Ford:''' You ask a glass of water. }}
* King Pyrrhus is said to have consulted an oracle of the god Apollo about whether he should fight the Romans. Apollo advised him "Aio te, Aeacida, Romanos vincere posse", (Ennius, Annales fr. 167). The sentence may be translated “I say, O son of Ajax, that you the Romans can conquer” –meaning either “You can conquer the Romans” or The Romans can conquer you”. (Cicero, De Divinatione ii. 56, § 116, remarked that it was odd that Apollo should speak in Latin.) This makes it [[Older Than Feudalism]]. The line became a proverbial example of amphiboly (ambiguous grammatical structure), and is quoted as such by Shakespeare (Henry VI, Part 2, I. iv. 62).
** It also seems somewhat accurate, given the nature of his [[Pyrrhic Victory]].
* ''[[
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
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'''C.J.:''' Your husband got eaten?
'''Abbey:''' My career.
'''C.J.:''' Yeah, well, I'm on dangling-modifier patrol.
|''[[The West Wing]]''}}
* When Wesley first showed up on ''[[Angel]]'', he announced that he had become a rogue demon hunter. Cordelia's response: "What's a rogue demon?"
* In an episode of ''[[I Love Lucy]]'', there was a comedic stage show featuring a "Man Eating Tiger"; Ricky holding a tiny, edible model tiger and taking a bite out of it.
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* '[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9H_cI_WCnE A one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater]'. This early (1950s!) music video makes it clear that the 'correct' interpretation was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying eater of purple people, but it's impossible to tell from the title of the song alone.
* [[Ray Stevens]]' "Little League":
{{quote|''I remember batting practice -- I put a baseball on a string
''And I told this kid, "When I nod my head, haul off and hit that thing!"
''Heh, gotta give him credit; he did ''exactly'' what I said
''Cuz the second that I nodded... HE HIT ME IN THE HEAD! }}
* [["Weird Al"
**
*** [[Take a Third Option|Or did he stuff a rabid wolverine into the underwear that he (Al) was wearing at the time?]]
* Mike Doughty's "Rising Sign" includes the deliberately ambiguous line "I resent the way you make me like myself". "Like" can be read as a verb or a preposition in the context, so it could mean either "I resent that you make me feel good about myself" or "I resent that you make me act in a way characteristic of myself".
* The last verse of [[The Kinks]]' "Lola" ends in "...I'm glad I'm a man and so is Lola". This could either mean that the naive narrator never found out that Lola was a man at all ("Lola and I are both glad that I am a man"), or that he ''did'' eventually figure it out and just doesn't mind ("I'm glad that Lola and I are both men").
== [[New Media]] ==
* In ''[[Vigor Mortis]]'' Lyn says "Isn't she the cutest". Rowan responds "Vita or the dead rat?", Lyn refuses to give him a clear answer and just gives him a grin.
* Another ambiguous headline featuring this trope: "Man Eating Piranha Accidentally Sold as Pet Fish". Actually, probably most ambiguous headlines would qualify, depending on how loosely we define the trope. They're even more vulnerable to it than normal sentences due to omitting lots of grammatical features. The professionals call these [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2407 crash blossoms].▼
** The actual origin is from a headline '''Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms'''<ref>Meaning that a violinist was both linked to the Japan Airlines crash - her father died in it - and has had her career prosper or 'blossom'.</ref>▼
** Also an example of why [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma|attention to punctuation]] is important. The headline would not be ambiguous if "man-eating" were hyphenated.▼
** Some other notable crash blossoms are "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms" and "Police Help Dog Bite Victim."▼
** When Ike Turner died, the ''New York Post'' failed to resist the temptation to run the headline [[Domestic Abuse|"Ike Beats Tina to Death."]]▼
* Robert Ripley, an American columnist, once wrote the supposed origin of the phrase "Pardon impossible. To be sent to Siberia", the meaning of which flips if the period is moved to become "Pardon. Impossible to be sent to Siberia".▼
* Newspaper headlines are particularly vulnerable to this due to pressures of space requiring all words that seem superfluous to be removed. Another issue is the (especially British) newspaper tendency to build up absurd compound nouns referring back to previous stories: '''Buried Alive Fiance Gets 20 Years in Prison''',<ref>He wasn't buried alive; he was the fiance involved in the 'buried alive' case - that is, he buried ''his'' fiancee alive</ref> '''Sex Quiz Cricket Ace in Hotel Suicide Leap''',<ref>"Sex Quiz Cricket Ace" is the subject - a 'cricket ace' being investigated by police for possible sex crimes - at least until he killed himself by leaping from a hotel balcony</ref> '''Whip rules furore claims first victim'''<ref>The "Whip rules furore" - the controversy caused by new rules on whipping in horse racing - has claimed its first victim - someone resigned.</ref>▼
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
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** [[Scrubs|"It's a riddle. Two guys destroyed your bike with a crowbar and a bat. One of them wasn't me."]]
== [[Radio]] ==
* This, from an episode of ''[[Hello Cheeky]]''.
{{quote|'''Tim:''' Barry, turn the radio on.
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** Then add in to this the "...of my Grandfather" card from ''Munchkin Fu'' and you can have such gems as the "Big Black .45... of Doom... of my Grandfather" which leads one to think that the gun killed the grand father.
== [[
* Groucho Marx's famous line "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don't know."
** And his "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
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* ''Pain Train'': "[http://paintraincomic.com/comic/the-terrible-buffet/ All You Can Eat, Buffet]" does ''not'' [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma|have the comma misplaced]].
== [[Web Original]] ==
* All The Tropes (and [[TV Tropes]]
** An example rightly documented in [[TV Tropes/Funny|TV Tropes]]:
{{quote|From the ''[[Peanuts]]'' [[Just Bugs Me]] page:
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Is it bad that I read the start of this entry as a list of 4 names, rather than an expletive and 3 names?
Jesus is laughing at Charlie Brown for having a great Christmas spirit! The irony!
Nope. I did it, too. As did my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
Your parents are Ayn Rand and God?}}
* The [[SCP Foundation]] has a "Six-Foot-Tall Man Eating Chicken." The SCP object is described as follows: "SCP-3467 is a six (6) foot tall, two hundred (200) pound man eating chicken. Subject is thirty five (35), slightly balding, dark brown hair and eyes, and slightly overweight. Name is Hank __________, and he has worked as a Level 1 cleanup crew for the past three years. Hank is never seen without a bucket of chicken, and only stops eating it when actually working, which is a rare occurrence in itself."
** Which is in turn a reference to ''[[The Little Rascals]]''.
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* A popular image on the internet is of a facebook post a man made because he was angry saying "Fuckin a man." His friends proceed to complement him on his guts to come out of the closet to the world. He doesn't get it.
** To clarify, "Fuckin a man" implies gay sex. "Fuckin a, man", which is what he meant, is angry sarcasm, the "A" being short for "Awesome".
▲* Another ambiguous headline featuring this trope: "Man Eating Piranha Accidentally Sold as Pet Fish". Actually, probably most ambiguous headlines would qualify, depending on how loosely we define the trope. They're even more vulnerable to it than normal sentences due to omitting lots of grammatical features. The professionals call these [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2407 crash blossoms].
▲** The actual origin is from a headline '''Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms'''<ref>Meaning that a violinist was both linked to the Japan Airlines crash - her father died in it - and has had her career prosper or 'blossom'.</ref>
▲** Also an example of why [[Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma|attention to punctuation]] is important. The headline would not be ambiguous if "man-eating" were hyphenated.
▲** Some other notable crash blossoms are "Iraqi Head Seeks Arms" and "Police Help Dog Bite Victim."
▲** When Ike Turner died, the ''New York Post'' failed to resist the temptation to run the headline [[Domestic Abuse|"Ike Beats Tina to Death."]]
▲* Robert Ripley, an American columnist, once wrote the supposed origin of the phrase "Pardon impossible. To be sent to Siberia", the meaning of which flips if the period is moved to become "Pardon. Impossible to be sent to Siberia".
▲* Newspaper headlines are particularly vulnerable to this due to pressures of space requiring all words that seem superfluous to be removed. Another issue is the (especially British) newspaper tendency to build up absurd compound nouns referring back to previous stories: '''Buried Alive Fiance Gets 20 Years in Prison''',<ref>He wasn't buried alive; he was the fiance involved in the 'buried alive' case - that is, he buried ''his'' fiancee alive</ref> '''Sex Quiz Cricket Ace in Hotel Suicide Leap''',<ref>"Sex Quiz Cricket Ace" is the subject - a 'cricket ace' being investigated by police for possible sex crimes - at least until he killed himself by leaping from a hotel balcony</ref> '''Whip rules furore claims first victim'''<ref>The "Whip rules furore" - the controversy caused by new rules on whipping in horse racing - has claimed its first victim - someone resigned.</ref>
{{reflist}}
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