the cleverness of headline writers

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

science reporting tends to get treated as a kind of feature writing, so
that science stories often  have cute or clever heads or lead-ins,
involving idioms, famous quotations, puns, alliteration, etc.  check
out the brief news items in Science, Scientific American, and the NYT
Science Times.  sometimes, though, the writers reach too far.

case in point: headline on the front page of the Oakland (CA) Tribune,
2/19/05, on a story about the detection of "a massive burst of energy
exploded from a far-off neutron star in December".  no problem there.
but the headline is:
    Science makes light
    of star's collapse
now the story's all about the wild enthusiasm of scientists about this
event.  no making light of it at all.

it's a mistake to pun on an expression that means the opposite of what
you want to say.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), amidst the rain and linguistics in
berkeley