As you may (or may not) know, I'm a native English speaker. So, that should mean I know English inside out, shouldn't it? Well, yes and no. My English is pretty good, even in comparison with other native speakers, but that doesn't mean I know every word / phrase / linguistic twist in English.
A case in point turned up today. I was watching a video and the narrator mentioned "crash blossoms". My brain went "crash" - car "blossoms" - flowers on trees - then it went ?????
Luckily the narrator then went on to explain what crash blossom means: Syntactic ambiguity in a newspaper headline. So, why didn't I know what it meant? Why had I never even heard of it before. The answer is it's only been around since 2009, when a couple of copy editors, Dan Bloom and Mike O'Connell, decided to use it to describe this phenomena based on a confusing headline " "Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms".
Can you guess what the headline means?
The article was from the newspaper Japan Today, and the story was about the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a plane crash in 1985.
So, now you know as much as I do. People make up words and old words die out. This means that, like me, you will never stop learning English.
