the headline comma

[Mark A. Mandel]

Headline writers often substitute a comma for "and" to save space. They
don't always look at what they get. In USA Today, either yesterday or
Wednesday, the big headline on the lead story was

        Warnings on river, lake fish jump

I don't know about you, but I first saw that as two conjoined abbreviated
sentences rather than one sentence in which a preposition had two conjoined
nouns as its object.

-- Mark A. Mandel
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