Many family members have expressed skepticism that dogs could have killed their loved ones, saying their injuries appeared too devastating to have been the result of dogbites.
So our ability to distinguish "man bitesdog" from "dog bites man" hinges on the attention that we pay to ordering and grouping, that allows us to get two different meanings out of the same set of words.
The four were believed to have been the only victims until the mother of 15-year-old Ana Gabriela Nataret Ramirez told Milenio Television lateTuesday that their daughter had died in hospital after being found covered with apparent dogbites near the Cerro de la Estrella park in the poor southeastern Mexico City district of Iztapalapa on the night of Dec. 16.
What was something to behold was the willingness of the media to be borne along by the story, which had all the attributes of dog-bites-man, instead of the reverse.