assorted

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

    Some headlines are so abbreviated they presuppose background knowledge, e.g., NY Daily News of the 1950's: "YANKS WIN; MICK: 2" =  New York Yankees won and Mickey Mantle hit two homers.  
 
     As for ambiguous headlines, my favorite one appeared in my local newspaper about 25 years ago (not on page one; it wasn't a major story here):  "CLEVER POLICE CHIEF ARRESTED."  "Clever" is the name of a town in Missouri, and its police chief had evidently done something way out of line.  In the spirit of taking the headline at face value I often mused: If the police chief was so clever, what was he doing getting arrested?
 
Gerald Cohen
Rolla (pronounced Rah-luh), Missouri

________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of James A. Landau
Sent: Sat 1/6/2007 12:32 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: assorted


<snip>.
 
Jonathan Lighter said "A nearly immutable rule of headline writing is never to use an unnecessary letter, space, or symbol."  No, it is not some arcane tradition that governs why headline writers use the wordings they do, but a very practical reason: headlines have to give a precis of the story in large type in a limited space.  When fighting to get a long story into as little type as possible, it's not surprising that ambiguities and unintentional double-entendres appear, e.g. "Short Police Officer Loses Sex Appeal" or "Nation's Hungry Attack Meese" . Try figuring out this one: "Concern For Guarding Software Mushrooms".  The Columbia Journalism Review runs a column of such amusing headlines in each issue.
 
<snip>
 
 

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