Today, as I was searching for something completely random on CNN’s website, I stumbled upon a very curious headline: Rape a weapon of war in Congo, activists say. My first reaction was to flinch back, squint, and think “Whoa, whoa, hold on there for a second! Pacifists are raping weapons now!?”. Then it dawned on me, and I realised no bazookas were being sodomised in the cradle of humanity. Rather, poor women and girls were victims of sexual violence in Africa. Sure, that’s still a very appalling state of affairs, but “shoot your load” would still mean “fire your ammo” in the war, and no images of hippies getting freaky with rocket launchers would burn your retina. I wish my interpretation was the correct one for the girls’ sake but, unfortunately, it’s very unlikely that pacifists will change their reproductive behaviour any time soon.

At first, I thought it was a classic case of the now pervasive Crash Blossoms in journalism. This is, as you can imagine, not unheard of (I think this applies both to misleading headlines and perverted hippies alike). The Associated Press reported last month that McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers: If you first thought Ronald McDonald incinerated antiquities, this is not your fault. Sometimes it’s even harder to understand what kind of message they’re trying to convey. Bad mental images are not uncommon if you try to figure out what crash blossoms are in a headline that reads Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms, and if you’re told French left torn in two in row over EU constitution, it’s only natural to think that a violent Europhile tore some poor French nationalist apart in a fight (actually, this on is quite tricky: this is about the French left – as in politics – being defeated two times consecutively). The way our brains try to parse these sentences is to blame here: they’re a very curious kind of Garden-Path Sentences.

The really amusing bit, however, is that no one else seems to be confused by that headline from CNN. I reckon this has got something to do with the fact that I was a sleep-deprived foreigner at the moment I read it (I’m still a foreigner, don’t get me wrong, but I took a nap soon afterwards), and my imagination is probably way too fertile.