I had to do a double-take on this headline. I had heard the news story on the radio, so I knew what it was about. Ironically, the headline can be taken to mean what it is intended to mean, or its exact opposite. The web site has it exactly the same way.

 I can read this two different ways:

• Walk to bus <pause> stops growing
• Walk to bus stops <pause> growing

 Not saying this is the case here, but newspapers sometimes do this kind of thing on purpose to attract attention. They make the headlines ambigious to get you interested and read the story.

The story is about how bus stops are getting bigger, right?

That's exactly why we concatenate nouns over here.

rbowes:

The story is about how bus stops are getting bigger, right?

No, it's about how we are getting taller as a people.

Terry Pratchett:

"Patrician attacks Clerk with Knife! (He had the Knife, not the Clerk.)"

dhromed:

rbowes:

The story is about how bus stops are getting bigger, right?

 

No, it's about how we are getting taller as a people.

dysmas:

 

Terry Pratchett:

"Patrician attacks Clerk with Knife! (He had the Knife, not the Clerk.)"

 "He shot a crackhead with a kalashnikov"

 Did ya hear the one about the guy who shot his neighbor with a shovel?

Faxmachinen:

That's exactly why we concatenate nouns over here.

Still we get stuff like "The police was cought by the cycle thief"... (a German magazine has a section called "Hohlspiegel" especially for stuff like this)

This, gentlemen, is called ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity in this case. Ambiguity is a most pervasive phenomenon in natural language yet we hardly ever noticed it. E.g., you probably missed the fact that "Walk" can also be an imperative ("You have to walk") as in "Walk to bus stops smiling". Syntactically perfectly well-formed, semantically a bit stretched. In my line of work, this doesn't even deserve a mug.

This is one reason to use a hyphen. "Walk to bus-stops growing" is unambiguous and it took only one piece of punctuation. Imagine that, punctuation has a use.

rbowes:

The story is about how bus stops are getting bigger, right?

Nope, it's obviously about some confused reporter who made a story about a role-playing convention... and starts the story with an amusing anecdote about the noisy convention environment; he seriously misheard the phrase "Walktapus stops growing", leading to hilarity.

chishm:

This is one reason to use a hyphen. "Walk to bus-stops growing" is unambiguous and it took only one piece of punctuation. Imagine that, punctuation has a use.

although, as someone already pointed out, that could still mean:  "You, walk to the bus-stop while growing."

tster:

chishm:

This is one reason to use a hyphen. "Walk to bus-stops growing" is unambiguous and it took only one piece of punctuation. Imagine that, punctuation has a use.

although, as someone already pointed out, that could still mean:  "You, walk to the bus-stop while growing."