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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Ha ha very funny. Except this is grammatically correct and not ambiguous. It would work with your joke interpretation if it said "who shot dead, unarmed, black man"
I disagree that this is unambiguous, I was also confused reading this headline. It's odd wording. It may be technically correct but that doesn't mean it's unambiguous.
“…shot and killed an unarmed…” would be a much better phrasing
Or "shot dead an unarmed black man". Three additional characters would have fixed this. I've long been frustrated by the journalistic style of removing every possible word from headlines. We're no longer reading these things printed on dead trees, there's no extra ink being spent or space wasted.
Many apps or websites cut titles off, though. It's important to keep them short.
I wish more people followed proper journalistic formats. Frustrates me when the first sentence is supposed to have everything you need to know - who, what, where, when, why, how - but instead these gen Z journalists think they should bury the details 5 paragraphs deep.
The proper way to write an article is to give the reader everything they need to know from the first sentence, and then expand in detail with each following paragraph, from most important to least.
I'd probably go with
London Cop Charged With Murder For Shooting Unarmed Black Man Dead
"Dead" and "unarmed" are adjectives and if they were being used like you thought, they should have a comma between them. I agree that it's potentially vague, but if you read it in your BBC broadcaster voice it should help
Could you put a common after dead to make it less ambiguous?
you could, but that would just make it sound like the cop shot a man who has already been dead even more
It's ambiguous. Adjectives don't need a comma like that, especially when there are two. You don't say "look at that small, red, fire hydrant", you just say "look at that small red fire hydrant" (and technically, you could call "fire" an adjective there too).
I'm not sure whether it is a hard and fast rule, but that sentence to me should be:
Looks like it's a fairly complicated and nuanced grammar rule:
https://style.mla.org/coordinate-adjectives-commas/
This is absolutely ambiguous diction.
“…who shot and killed unarmed black man…” would have been substantially more specific and readable without potential confusion.
Except "shot and killed" it self can be ambiguous. What did he kill them with? Did he shoot him then kill him with a knife?
Shot dead, means the shooting is what killed the man.
In school you learn to keep titles short. You added a lot of filler words that can ruin the headline on apps that cut them off, or printed media.
Shot dead is correct.
"fatally shot" is the same amount of words and less confusing
"shot dead" is a phrasel verb, therefore it can (I would argue in this particular context it should) be split:
shot (whom?) dead.
I shot him dead
He shot his wife dead
Cop shot unarmed black man dead (including press-specific omitting of articles because English is stupid)
And yet, we wouldn’t be having this discussion if the wording was actually unambiguous.
I removed one word and added two. That’s not “a lot of filler words”.
"who shot an unarmed black man dead"
That just sounds weird to me
weirder than "shot dead unarmed man"?
Yes! I didn't realise "shot dead" wasn't a phrase in US dialect until today.
Yeah, definitely. I think this is more of a UK vs US thing. I'm from the UK so it sounds much more normal for a headline
Quick tip - if the majority of people who read something find it ambiguous, it is. Plain and simple - especially for languages like English that don't have a central authority for setting language rules.
It's written by a British person in OG English. This phrase isn't unambiguous here and it took me a sec to figure out why people were confused. It's just a syntax difference but surely you can figure it out with context clues, just like I did with your interpretation.
Quick tip - People with a poor grasp of un-simplified English are not the majority