Garden Path sentences

Two weeks ago, at the NYRSF weekly meeting, agrumer and bugsybanana both commented on a sentence that was hard to read correctly, the first time through:

The play is anchored in the tripartite model of being proposed in Sartre's Being and Nothingness (1943).

It's hard not to read "being" as part of a single, multi-word verb ("being proposed") rather than in the correct sense, as a gerund which is the object of the preposition "of". This lead me to a discussion of "garden-path sentences", where the initial sense of a word is completely redefined by later parts of the sentence. The canonical example is "The horse raced past the barn fell", in which "raced" is first interpreted as the action of the sentence ("the horse raced past the barn") and is then redefined as part of a relative clause (the horse that was "raced past the barn" is the one that fell).

On NPR this morning [as I started writing this--June 29. I think], I heard a much better one:

North Korea has turned in to China [pause] its declaration of its nuclear weapons programs.

That is, North Korea has prepared a declaration, and turned it over to China. But before the pause, it's a completely difference sentence.

The meaning of tragedy

The meaning of tragedy is: All is in order, all is in train.
The meaning of tragedy is: It only hurts for a little while.
The meaning of tragedy is: Change is the first law of life.

--Peter Straub, "Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff" (1998)