Not long ago, an editor e-mailed a document to me, but it somehow went astray. When I told her that it hadn’t arrived, she responded with the words: “I resent it.” I wrote back, jokingly, “What do you resent?”

This is a case of a linguistic ambiguity. Because English is filled with double meanings and puns, such confusions can easily occur. The results can be amusing or tragic — or both.

Here are some classic ambiguous headlines, all alleged to be genuine mistakes. (The first became the title of a book that immortalized such errors.)

I titled a recent column “Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope.”   An eagle-eyed reader pointed out that the sentence contains an error called a “comma splice.” Because the two phrases could be complete sentences, they should be separated by a semicolon, not a comma. But as I noted, I…

When I studied French in high school, we were taught the phrase faux amis, or “false friends.” The expression refers to foreign-language words whose meanings you think you know but which can lead you astray if you’re not careful. A similar phenomenon occurs in English, as demonstrated by the many…