I SHOULDN’T have been amused, but I couldn’t help it. I confess a headline on our website on Tuesday made me smile. It read “Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre reach out-of-court settlement in civil sex claim”.

My first thought was hmm, that’s somewhat humbling for the sweatless one. My second: ah well, at least the sex was civil.

Immature, I know. But this was an example of one of the pratfalls that await the unsuspecting headline writer.

We should beware of words, even the most innocuous ones, that have more than one meaning (as in the case above, civil), or that involve double entendres. We know, most of us, to be careful when dealing with balls, holes and screws, but how about packages? I can only sympathise with the sub-editor from Michigan’s Eastern Echo, who in January 2009 inadvertently went viral with “Republicans turned off by size of Obama’s package”. Easily done, friend, easily done.

Many of the traps lie in what can be summed up as headlinese: where rules on grammar don’t apply and abbreviations, multiple nouns and present-tense verbs are de rigeur. The Oxford online dictionary defines it as “the condensed, elliptical, or sensationalist style of language characteristic of (especially newspaper) headlines”.

Those verbs can certainly land you in trouble. In March 2011, the Vancouver Sun gave us “Passing wind strands BC Ferry passengers”. In a similar vein “Monty flies back to front” from the Second World War is well known, but is probably apocryphal; certainly I can find no certified citation (the same applies to its older brother from the First World War, “British push bottles up Germans”).

We then have words that are really only used by sub-editors: probes, boffins, supremos, dynamos, romps, rats, aces, babes, raps and axed abound in 72 point, but rarely in everyday speech. If you ever do hear of a boffin supremo who has been probed after a love nest romp and subsequently axed, please do let us know.

We can also fall foul of jargon which becomes so commonplace we use it almost without thinking, as in “Red tape holds up new houses". And sometimes, we can just be plain unlucky, as in “Marijuana issue sent to a joint committee” from the Toronto Star. Hey, it’s factually accurate, isn’t it? Stop smirking at the back. Won’t anyone buy that poor sub a drink?

Lest you think, dear reader, that this writer is above all of the foregoing, I confess that many, many years ago, on the Aberdeen Press & Journal, I was responsible for a headline on a Nib (news in brief, a one-paragraph story) about impending fisheries negotiations that read “Peterhead fish talks”. I’m still awaiting the call from a researcher at That’s Life.

 

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