Clever police chief arrested

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

    FWIW, I don't think the headline writer was trying to be funny at all.  There are various Missouri place-names that strike outsiders as humorous but are simply taken for granted by local residents.  Take the town of Tightwad, for example.  About twenty years ago a bank was opened there--the First Bank of Windsor at Tightwad (IIRC).  To the locals, this was a routine, non-humorous event. 
 
     But to outsiders (especially in other states), the idea of a bank in a place called Tightwad was worthy of at least a giggle or two. The opening of the bank received brief comment in newspapers in many states--as a nice lighthearted item--and people from as far away as Hawaii began to open up checking accounts there simply to be able to write a check from a bank with Tightwad in its name. Or to dedicate the checking account to their brother-in-law.  The bank soon realized it had a good thing going and changed its name to Tightwad Bank, which it kept for at least 5-10 years before changing it to something else.
 
     Also, humorous headlines don't seem to belong to the culture of newspapers in mid-Missouri (vs. e.g., the NY Post). And I really don't think there were many people besides myself who picked up on the humorous ambiguity of the headline Clever Police Chief Arrested. 
 
Gerald Cohen
 
________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Joel S. Berson
Sent: Sat 1/6/2007 2:59 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Clever police chief arrested

At 1/6/2007 02:49 PM, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>     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?

No, it was the headline-writer who was clever.

Joel

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