What are examples of amphiboly?

"I shot an elephant in my pajamas" is amphiboly: a sentence that reads two ways because of its word order, not because any single word carries two meanings. Who is wearing the pajamas, the shooter or the elephant? The grammar holds both, and that double-vision is the whole figure. Here is the catch that organizes every example below: the exact same structure that makes Groucho Marx funny is what wrecks a newspaper headline by accident, so the practical question is never "is this amphiboly" but "did I mean it."

"I shot an elephant in my pajamas"

Captain Spaulding's line from Animal Crackers (Marx, 1930) is the example everyone reaches for, and it earns the spot. "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know."

The first sentence is built to be read one way. "In my pajamas" describes the shooter: a man in his sleepwear, rifle in hand. That is the reading your ear takes on the way through, because it is the only one that makes sense of the world.

Then the second sentence forces the other parse. "In my pajamas" was never bolted to I shot. Grammatically it can modify elephant just as easily, and Groucho springs that reading: the elephant was wearing the pajamas. Both parses were sitting in the first sentence the whole time. The joke is the figure caught in the act, working on purpose.

That is the structure to hold onto. A prepositional phrase ("in my pajamas") can attach to two different things in the same sentence, and grammar alone won't tell you which. When you control which reading the audience lands on and when, the ambiguity is a tool.

Did you know? The film line is usually misquoted as "How he got into my pajamas I'll never know." Groucho actually says "in my pajamas, I don't know." Either way, the figure only lands because of the follow-up. The first sentence on its own is just a slightly odd sentence; the laugh comes when the second sentence reaches back and turns on the reading you didn't take.

Newspaper headlines that didn't mean it

Headlines are where writers produce amphiboly by accident, and they produce a lot of it. The cause is compression. Strip the articles, the auxiliary verbs, and the punctuation out of a sentence to make it fit a column, and you remove the very signals that told the reader which parse to take. A word that should read as a verb suddenly reads as a noun. A phrase meant to modify one thing drifts onto another.

Copy editors have a name for the result: a crash blossom. The term itself comes from a 2009 headline in Japan Today, "Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms," which was about a violinist whose career flourished after her father died in a plane crash. Read "blossoms" as a verb and it works. Read "crash blossoms" as a compound noun, some kind of flower, and the sentence falls apart. An editor on the Testy Copy Editors forum flagged it, and the name stuck.

The table below works the same way each example does: an intended reading, an absurd one the grammar also allows, and the specific slip that opened the door.

Headline	Intended reading	Unintended reading	What caused the slip
"Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms" (Japan Today, 2009)	A violinist linked to the JAL crash is thriving	A violinist linked to a flower called a "JAL crash blossom"	"Blossoms" reads as a noun instead of a verb
"Woman burned as a baby tracks down nurse who cared for her" (Chicago Tribune, 2015)	A woman, burned when she was a baby, finds her old nurse	A woman is burned in the act of using a baby to track someone	"As a baby" floats free; "tracks" reads as the main verb of "woman"
"Knife crime: St John Ambulance to teach teens to help stab victims" (BBC News, 2021)	Teach teens to help the victims of stabbings	Teach teens to help commit stabbings	"Stab victims" parses as verb-plus-object, not noun phrase
"German factory orders slide unexpectedly" (The Guardian, 2015)	Factory orders declined	German factories issue an order: slide, unexpectedly	"Orders" reads as a verb, "slide" as its object

None of these editors intended a second reading. That is the whole point of the accidental camp: the writer sees only the sentence they meant. The reader, coming in cold, sees both and stalls on the wrong one. (The old wartime howlers like "French push bottles up German rear" get passed around as specimens, but they trace to no reliable original, so treat them as folklore rather than evidence.)

The oracle that cuts both ways

Deliberate amphiboly has an older job than comedy: evasion. A prophecy built to parse two ways is true no matter how events fall, which protects the one who delivered it.

The schoolbook case is the Latin line Ibis redibis numquam per bella peribis. Move the comma and the meaning flips. "Ibis, redibis, numquam per bella peribis" means you will go, you will return, never shall you perish in war. "Ibis, redibis numquam, per bella peribis" means you will go, you will return never, you shall perish in war. The oracle commits to nothing; the soldier's fate decides which reading was the real one. (This line is usually told as an ancient oracle, but it has no attestation in any classical source and looks like a later teaching example. It illustrates the figure cleanly even so.)

The genuinely classical version is the one Cicero records in De Divinatione (2.116): Aio te, Aeacida, Romanos vincere posse, the oracle's answer to King Pyrrhus. Latin lets the accusative te ("you") and Romanos ("the Romans") each be the subject or the object of vincere ("to conquer"). So the line means either I say that you can conquer the Romans or I say that the Romans can conquer you. Pyrrhus heard the first. The grammar always held both.

Shakespeare knew the trick and pointed straight at it. In Henry VI, Part 2 (1.4), a summoned spirit prophesies, "The duke yet lives that Henry shall depose." Does Henry depose the duke, or the duke depose Henry? The clause won't say. York, hearing it read aloud, names the source out loud: "Why, this is just Aio te, Aeacida, / Romanos vincere posse." The play is doing the figure and citing its own model for it in the same breath.

Contracts, statutes, and a missing comma

Amphiboly stops being a parlor trick the moment money rides on the parse. A contract or a statute is a sentence whose two readings can be worth millions, and the grammar decides which one a court enforces.

In O'Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy (1st Cir. 2017), a Maine overtime law listed the activities that did not earn overtime pay, ending with "packing for shipment or distribution of" various foods. With no comma before "or distribution," the clause reads two ways. Either "packing for shipment or distribution" names one activity (packing, whether the goods are headed for shipment or for distribution), or "packing for shipment" and "distribution" are two separate activities. The dairy's delivery drivers distribute but don't pack. Under the first reading they were owed overtime; under the second they were not.

The First Circuit held the clause genuinely ambiguous and, under Maine's rule of reading wage law in the workers' favor, decided for the drivers. The opinion opens, "For want of a comma, we have this case." Oakhurst later settled for $5 million. The case is often retold as "the Oxford comma won in court," but the court ruled on the ambiguity itself, and Maine's own drafting manual actually tells legislators not to use the serial comma. The comma would have prevented the fight; it didn't decide it.

Amphiboly in scripture

Translation is where scriptural amphiboly surfaces, because the underlying Greek manuscripts carried no punctuation. A comma is a choice the translator makes, and where the comma lands can change the sentence.

Luke 23:43 is the standard case. The King James Version reads, "Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise," with the comma before "to day." That ties "today" to being in paradise. Move the comma after "today" and it ties instead to the speaking: I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise. The first reading dates the arrival in paradise; the second dates only the promise. Most translations keep the comma where the KJV puts it; a few, including the New World Translation, place it after "today," and at least one declines to punctuate the spot at all.

The point for a writer is narrow and secular: the words are fixed, the punctuation is not, and the two parses are real. Where the figure turns on the comma alone, you have grammar-level ambiguity. Where it turns on a single word meaning two things, you have something else, and the line between grammar-level and word-level ambiguity is the one several of these scripture cases actually sit on.

Accident or tool: how to read your own sentence

Every example above is the same grammar. The Groucho line and the Chicago Tribune headline are built identically; one is a joke and one is a mistake. The oracle and the dairy contract both parse two ways; one does it to protect the speaker and one did it by oversight. Nothing in the sentence marks which is which. The only difference is intent.

So the test on your own draft is a single question: does the second reading help. If it lands a joke, hides a hedge, or layers a meaning you want, the ambiguity is the figure and you keep it. If it just stalls the reader on a parse you never meant, it is the vice the old handbooks warned about, and you fix it. When you've decided a stray double-reading is an accident, the repair is mechanical, a matter of restoring the word order or punctuation that pins the parse: the work of clearing amphiboly out of a sentence. When you've decided you want it, slogans are the natural place to put it to work, and deliberate amphiboly in ad copy shows the figure carrying weight on purpose.

The reader who came for examples should leave with a habit instead. When a sentence of yours reads two ways, the question is not whether it counts as amphiboly. It is whether you meant it.