Some Blog Site

Here is a photo of a container of eggs that we bought at the store.

Regular readers of this blog will already know where I am going with this. So I could just leave it at that. But, for the sake of my irregular readers, I will continue.

The phrase “Vegetarian Fed Hens” is ambiguous. You think they are trying to convey the idea that their hens do not eat meat, and these eggs came from those hens therefore you are getting healthier eggs.

But the phrase can be taken a few different ways. How do you know what they really mean?

Maybe they are trying to be sneaky. Maybe their chickens were fed meat, but it was a vegetarian who gave them the meat.
“No, look. It clearly says that a vegetarian fed our hens. Sure, we left an ‘a’ and an ‘our’, but no one really needs those articles anyway.”

Or maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe they kidnap unsuspecting vegetarians and feed them to the chickens.
That would probably be something a company would not want to admit on its packaging though.

For that reason, I cannot recommend the usual fix of adding a hyphen. That would make it read “Vegetarian-Fed Hens”, and that would not make it unambiguous as to what the hens are eating. We still wouldn’t know if the vegetarians are feeding the hens or being fed to the hens.

The real problem is that vegetarians is an adjective and a noun. The company meant it as an adjective but the phrase uses it as a noun. What we need is a complete rephrasing.

• “Our Hens are Vegetarians”
• “We Employ Vegetarian Hens”
• “Eggs from Vegetarian Hens”

Any other ideas?