Recently I was having conversation with a friend of mine when he wrote a sentence containing the line, “ ….the French protest interest groups.” Normally this happening in an irc channel I couldn't care less about how someone wrote a sentence
What struck me about this sentence was that the meaning of the sentence could be changed depending on how protest was perceived, if it was a noun then it had one meaning, if it was a verb then it had a completely different meaning. Being fascinated by this I did a quick Google search and found that they where called Initial-stress-derived nouns
Here are some:
Affect Block Bottle Brush
Complex Document Exploit Fart
Guide Heat Invite Jail
Knock Lick Misprint Name
Offer Push Quarter Reprint
Sail Taxi Undercount Visit
Wage X-ray Yell Zeugma
Then I came up with some sentences that could use these words to change their meanings.
Czech bear search party.
Soviet push blocks up Germans.
After reading around a bit more I found out that these where essential parts of the logical fallacy known as the amphiboly. Which occurs when a sentence can have a different meaning depending on how it's written. You usually see this with poor use of grammar but as shown above, is not limited to comas and loose use of pronouns.
