Zombie Recession Stories

When I saw the op-ed headline “Kill these zombie recession stories,” I assumed it would be about recessions that seemingly come back from the dead after the recovery has begun — what economists often refer to as a “double-dip” recession. But no! It’s really about recession-related news stories that keep coming back every time there’s a recession.

And then I realized… it’s what my linguist brother Neal would call a bracketing ambiguity! You see, I read it as {{zombie recession} stories}, whereas the author meant {zombie {recession stories}}.

On this site, you don’t just get undead economics, you get undead linguistics, too. And add “zombie [ ] stories” to the list of undead metaphors.


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