Here is an incomplete book title:

First ______ Last

Can you work out what the missing word is? Don’t continue reading until you have tried to do so.

OK, it’s difficult so, I’m going to give you a clue. Here is a description of the book (taken from Amazon.com):

This book is intended to help the start-up business, home business or entrepreneur design a professional-looking business card and letterhead at a reasonable cost. Just because you are new in business you don’t have to look like it. You can have the look of an established professional. This book covers choosing a name, typestyle, graphics, some smart business information and where to get help.

If you have the answer, well done. If not, here is the book cover (sorry about the red ink that was accidentally spilled on the key word).

Without the clues, this is quite a difficult puzzle. What happens is that your brain identifies the word ‘last’ as an adjective. But of course, it is a verb. Perhaps this could be called a parser breakdown (by the way, go down to the bottom of the page if you still don’t have the answer).

Parsing is the mental process in which the listener or reader determines the lexical categories (subject, object, verb, adjective, etc) of the words that are coming from the speaker or writer. It is a process that goes on in all of our brains during language reception.

Generally, our parsers do an excellent job. It’s not often that a misunderstanding occurs as a result of a parser breakdown. But we often like to play with language so that it does. Consider the title of a well-known book about punctuation by Lynne Truss:

To understand the title, you have to read the joke on the back cover of the book:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then takes out a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter as the panda walks towards the exit. The panda gives him a badly punctuated wildlife manual.
“I’m a panda,” he says. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Lynne Truss is concerned with punctuation in this case. In the joke, the presence of the comma between the words ‘eats‘ and ‘shoots‘ changes the meaning of the phrase. But parser breakdowns don’t always result from bad punctuation.

For example, while reading about nebulae (the birth place of stars) on Wikipedia recently, I had to read the following sentence three times before it made sense:

“The cloud collapses and fragments, sometimes forming hundreds of new stars.”

The problem: I thought that the word ‘fragments‘ was a plural noun rather than a third person singular form verb.

Finally, three well-known jokes that depend on parser breakdowns:

Customer: Waiter, waiter, what is this?
Waiter: It’s bean soup sir.
Customer: I don’t care what it’s been. What is it now?

Customer: Waiter, waiter, this coffee tastes like mud.
Waiter: I’m not surprised sir. It was ground just a moment ago.

Q: What’s black and white and /red/ all over?
A: A newspaper

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

(Click here for some further reading.)