A commenter on FARK noted this headline on the website for KMOV St. Louis:
Infant pulled from wrecked car
involved in short police pursuit
…adding, "No word on how far his short little legs took him before the police caught up with him."
The headline was quickly edited thereafter, and it now reads:
Infant pulled from car after police chase, crash
Victor Steinbok, who brought this to my attention, observes that "the updated headline is only marginally better."
The original headline was a classic crash blossom — complete with a crash (don't worry, the infant and other passengers are OK). As is typical of crash blossoms, there is an ambiguous reading resulting from the elliptical style of headlinese. The intended reading was:
{[An] infant} [was] {pulled from {[a] wrecked car [which was] involved in [a] short police pursuit}}
But it can be just as easily read as:
{[An] infant [who was] pulled from [a] wrecked car} [was] {involved in [a] short police pursuit}
The revised headline gets rid of the syntactic ambiguity, but some pragmatic ambiguity remains relating to the infant's involvement with the police chase and crash. Without reading the story, wherein we learn of the three adults in the car, it's still possible to imagine the infant as Babyface Finster from the old Bugs Bunny cartoon (or Baby Herman from "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"), trying to make a getaway from the cops. This infant is clearly as talented as the newborn who searched for her birth mother.
Before-and-after screenshots (the first pulled from the Google cache):
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