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Grex > Language > #57: Misuse of the English Language by Newspaper Headlines | |
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srw
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Misuse of the English Language by Newspaper Headlines
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Feb 5 16:50 UTC 1994 |
The following is a list of headlines actually taken from newspapers.
They demonstrate misuse of the English Language by that medium.
The list was sent to me from the MIT humor mailing list.
The oldest attributions is suzanne@haas.berkeley.edu (Suzanne Lamar)
I hope she is the original author, otherwise that attribution is lost.
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Something went wrong in jet crash, experts say
Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers
Safety experts say school bus passengers should be belted
Drunk gets nine months in violin case
Survivor of siamese twins joins parents
Farmer Bill dies in house
Iraqi head seeks arms
Stud tires out
Prostitutes appeal to Pope
Panda mating fails, veterinarian takes over
Soviet virgin lands short of goal again
British left waffles on Falkland Islands
Lung cancer in women mushrooms
Eye drops off shelf
Teacher strikes idle kids
Reagan wins on budget, but more lies ahead
Shot off woman's leg helps Nicklaus to 66
Enraged cow injures farmer with axe
Plane too close to ground, crash probe told
Miners refuse to work after death
Squad helps dog bite victim
Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
Stolen painting found by tree
Two Soviet ships collide, one dies
Two sisters reunited after 18 years at checkout counter
Killer sentenced to die for second time in 10 years
Never withhold herpes infection from loved one
Drunken drivers paid $1000 in '84
War dims hope for peace
If strike isn't settled quickly, it may last a while
Cold wave linked to temperature
Enfiels couple slain, police suspect homicide
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| 30 responses total. |
katie
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response 1 of 30:
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Feb 5 20:51 UTC 1994 |
A few weeks ago I walked up to the door at church to go to choir practice,
and there was a big sign on it that read: NO DOMESTIC VIOLENCE TONIGHT.
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omni
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response 2 of 30:
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Feb 5 22:28 UTC 1994 |
I think it's an attempt to make the headlines a little less gory and
a little more punny. I recall seeing more than one bad pun in there.
It's definitly an offshoot of television journalism which is almost
an oxymoron.
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srw
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response 3 of 30:
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Feb 6 00:27 UTC 1994 |
Some of those puns were groaners, I admit, but I think the writers of
those headlines never intended one of them to wind up in a
laughing-stock like this item. I'll bet on incompetence.
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rcurl
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response 4 of 30:
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Feb 6 06:36 UTC 1994 |
Its interesting to try to identify the "error" in each. Many are just
stating the obvious ("Cold wave linked to temperature."); others suffer
from elision ("Never withhold <information about> herpes....."). Word
order (unclear antecedent) occurs in quite a few. Most are pretty funny,
in any case.
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carl
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response 5 of 30:
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Feb 6 12:49 UTC 1994 |
Back in junior high schoool I had a journalism teacher that taught us
to come up headlines like that. He used to call them "teasers," and
he said the idea was to get people to read the article. People very
often browse the headlines, and unless something catches their attention,
they skip most articles. I wish I still had the list of headlines that
he gave us for examples--they were similar to the ones above.
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omni
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response 6 of 30:
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Feb 7 07:15 UTC 1994 |
heh, I could write some wild ones, and I do about Tonya Harding just
to provide some humor for my mom. Sometimes, she'll be doing dishes and
invaribly she'll ask what was said about Tonya, and I'll fire off a funny
one just to make her giggle. I think that the media frenzy is sorta
funny when you think about it. I'll bet she can't go to the can without
being asked to comment about her performance.
"Tonya... any comments?"
/
;)
Of course in the name of decency, and since this IS a public forum,
I will not post anything that would be libelous or salacious to Ms.
Harding.
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kami
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response 7 of 30:
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Feb 12 04:17 UTC 1994 |
I just read this. I was laughing so hard before the end that My eyes were
squeezing shut, my jaw hurt and I couldn't breathe. Killer!
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srw
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response 8 of 30:
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Feb 12 06:08 UTC 1994 |
Good, I've got more for you. The following aren't all necessarily headlines,
but they are certainly misuses of language.
From: CT Hart <cth@cs.itc.hp.com>
MANGLING MODIFIERS
(Collected by Richard Lederer)
* Yoko Ono will talk about her husband, John Lennon, who was killed in an
interview with Barbara Walters.
* After years of being lost under a pile of dust, Chester D.
Thatcher III found all the old records of the Bangor Lions Club at
the Bangor House.
* Please take time to look over the brochure that is enclosed with
your family.
* I wish to express my thanks to the Post Office for the great, kind service
they give and for the patience they have with little old ladies in mailing
packages.
* Plunging 1,000 feet into the gorge, we saw Yosemite Falls.
* CALF BORN TO FARMER WITH TWO HEADS
* CHURCHILL LEAVES WIFE LEANING ON PLANE
* Two cars were reported stolen by the Groveton police yesterday.
* As a baboon who grew up wild in the jungle, I relized that Wiki had special
nutritional needs.
* In 1979, he bought majority control of the company's stock, along with his
mother.
* Locked in a vault for 50 years, the owner of the jewels has decided to sell
them.
* Breaking into the window of the girls' dormitory, the dean of men surprised
10 members of the football team.
* The judge sentenced the killer to die in the electric chair for the second
time.
* Farmhand Joe Mobbs hoists a cow injured while giving birth to its feet.
* Here are some suggestions for handling obscene phone calls from New
England Telephone Company.
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rcurl
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response 9 of 30:
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Feb 12 19:47 UTC 1994 |
Most of this set are examples of misplaced or dangling modifiers. I have
an apparently insurmountable problem in the senior chemical engineering
laboratory I manager, to get the students to *not* make these mistakes.
For example, they will write "Using the globe valve, the level in the
tank was adjusted.", rather than, "The level in the tank was adjusted
with the globe valve." The first, of course, starts to imply that the
level in the tank was using the valve, and one has to do a mental
adjustment to get the right picture. My question is, *why are almost
all of our students taught to write with dangling modifiers*?! It must
be some "creative writing" gimmick. Almost no one *speaks* this way;
it mostly happens only in writing.
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davel
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response 10 of 30:
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Feb 12 21:51 UTC 1994 |
My experience is that it does happen very frequently in speech. In many
cases ("As a single parent I think you have to ...") the addition of commas
would resolve the structure ("As a single parent, I think, you have to ...);
but most people neither indicate such structure in speech (by pauses or
whatever) nor use commas in writing, in cases like this.
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rcurl
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response 11 of 30:
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Feb 13 08:04 UTC 1994 |
I don't know about that, davel. At least the clause has the clear
antecedent "I". I know the students would say "The door was opened
with a key.". Why would then then write (as they consistently do),
"Using a key, the door was opened".?
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danr
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response 12 of 30:
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Feb 13 15:18 UTC 1994 |
People think that writing must be "formal," rather than coversational.
I think this is also the reason so many people use the passive voice
when writing. We need to get folks thinking and writing in the active
voice.
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omni
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response 13 of 30:
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Feb 13 22:33 UTC 1994 |
I write in the same way I would talk to someone; Although I am not sure
if this practice is proper.
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davel
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response 14 of 30:
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Feb 14 00:51 UTC 1994 |
Omni, I can just about guarantee that you don't talk & write in exactly the
same way. No one does, completely. The differences vary, however, and
of course even varies within one person's writing according to context
and purpose.
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srw
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response 15 of 30:
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Feb 14 06:29 UTC 1994 |
I would also venture to say that for most purposes, one's writing should
be somewhat more formal than one's speaking. For example,
contractions are not preferred when writing, but aren't avoided
when speaking.
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omni
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response 16 of 30:
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Feb 14 07:00 UTC 1994 |
not 100% but somewhere in the high 80% range.
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remmers
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response 17 of 30:
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Feb 14 10:50 UTC 1994 |
There's lotsa differences between the way I speak and, uh, the way
I write.
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davel
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response 18 of 30:
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Feb 14 11:49 UTC 1994 |
The tendency to be more formal in writing is a good one, on the whole, IMO.
It does turn into the kind of thing Rane was complaining about, and it's also
subject to other abuses. One of these is vocabulary inflation - the use
of ten-dollar words where two-bit ones would be preferable. "Peruse" for
"read", "desire" for "want" or "would like", and so on come to mind (not that
they're the best examples). But this tends to lead people into pure and
simple misuse of those "fancier" words, as they seem to feel that words that
they're familiar with aren't formal enough - so they use words they're
unfamiliar with and get them wrong. Teaching intro philosophy courses was
something of an eye-opener for me; some of the things people came up with
were quite surprising and amusing. Or there was the committee chairman
whose report kept saying that the committee had "dispersed" funds to this
or that cause; she apparently was unaware of the word "disburse" but had
heard it used in similar contexts. If she'd just said "given" or "spent"
when that was what she meant I'd never have known about her ignorance.
(I had the job of typing these reports. Another eye-opener.)
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srw
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response 19 of 30:
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Feb 14 15:17 UTC 1994 |
Dispersed - that's a good one. It leaves me with the image of
the committee scattering dollar bills from a tall building.
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omni
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response 20 of 30:
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Feb 14 21:21 UTC 1994 |
I don't like using a lot of "50 cent words" as Twain refered to them as
I like using just plain everyday english, that most everyone understands.
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davel
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response 21 of 30:
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Feb 15 01:00 UTC 1994 |
(Inflation shows in my figures.)
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omni
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response 22 of 30:
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Feb 15 06:16 UTC 1994 |
heh.
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albaugh
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response 23 of 30:
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Feb 15 06:33 UTC 1994 |
Re: "plain everyday english"
There are two obvious reasons to use alternatives instead of the same words
all the time: 1) variety 2) a subtle shade of meaning expressed by one word
not associated with another. Often 2) can be lost on readers if the subtlety
is too subtle :-) . And while 1) is probably a desirable thing (wantable? :-)
a Thesaurus in inexperienced hands can be a dangerous beast. Let's see, was
that Jurassic or Triassic? :-)
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davel
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response 24 of 30:
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Feb 15 15:59 UTC 1994 |
Agreed, with slight reservations. I tend myself not to use most people's
plain everyday English (as should be obvious to those who know me here on
Grex); I tend to choose my words from a slightly larger vocabulary than
average and use them a bit more precisely than most, for exactly the reasons
in your 2). I was complaining about those who use less common words under
the impression that they're gaining something without any clue to the
actual differences in meaning.
My reservations are about "variety". An extremely flat, repetitive style
is very unattractive, but conscious attempts to introduce elegant variation
tend to produce writing that ranges from baroque to bizarre. If I think
of it later I may quote a rather long discussion, by James Blish, of
attempts to avoid repeating the word "said". It's perfectly on target
(IMNAAHO), and quite funny.
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