Students Turn Anger at Faculty Cuts to Action

This is a headline from The Sophian, my college's newspaper. I had to read it at least 5 times before I could parse it into a grammatical sentence. At first I read: "Students turn [anger at faculty cuts to action]". But "Students turn [noun]" didn't make sense, so I decided they must mean "angry" instead of "anger". Like "Students turn angry at [faculty cuts to action]". But then I thought, what the hell is a "cut to action"?

As you read a sentence, you subconsciously predict what its structure will be. You start fitting the words into that structure as you go along, revising your guess if you come across words that don't fit, and usually by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you've figured out its grammar and you know what it means. Except, every once in a while, you haven't and you don't.

In part, this sentence fooled me because The Sophian is really crappy. I expect errors in that paper, so when my sentence structure didn't work, I didn't automatically assume I was wrong; I assumed they'd just made one of their frequent grammar screw ups.

That's not the whole story, though. I think also, the phrase "call to action" is so common that when I saw "cut to action" I tried to fit it into the same pattern.

Also, when you're using the verb "turn" to mean "transform," I think "turn X into Y" is much more common than "turn X to Y." The latter sounds like it's out of a fairy tale or a fable. I'm a dork and love Google book search, so from Hans Christian Andersen:

"Mortals, on the other hand, have a soul, which lives forever after the body has turned to dust."

"I was looking at the deep river and saw how it plunged down from the cliff, turned to spray..."
"The old Phoenix turned to ashes..."

"...nor could he know whose eyes had been closed and whose red lips had turned to dust."

"...all about the murdered young man, whose head had now turned to dust..."

In a Sophian article, which is decidedly different from your average fairy tale, doesn't "Students Turn Anger at Faculty Cuts into Action" make a whole lot more sense?

I think so.