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.

--

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

30 responses total.

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.

 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.

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.

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.

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.

 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.

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!

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.

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. 

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.

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".?

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.

 I write in the same way I would talk to someone; Although I am not sure
if this practice is proper.

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.

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. 

 not 100% but somewhere in the high 80% range.

There's lotsa differences between the way I speak and, uh, the way
I write.

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.)

Dispersed - that's a good one. It leaves me with the image of
the committee scattering dollar bills from a tall building.

 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.

(Inflation shows in my figures.)

heh.

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?  :-)

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.

said, replied, responded, countered, agreed, objected, ...  :-)

You haven't begun to scratch the surface.  Smiled, smirked, swallowed,
shrugged, verified ... I'll try to remember to post some choice bits.

As I promised a while back:
This is James Blish on the subject of what he called "said-bookism".  The
context was a review of a story in a SF magazine; since the story is
deservedly forgotten, I'm going to cut references to the author's name.
I'm also quoting only Blish's comments relating to the defect under
consideration.

        His dialogue is terrible.  All the speakers sound alike, and all of
    them sound like the narrative passages--that is, like Mr. ____
    himself.  The text betrays an obvious reason for this failure.  Mr.
    ____ has concentrated upon how* a thing is said, to the exclusion of
    *what* is said, which is exactly the wrong way to write dialogue.  How
    do we know he's done this?  An informal count of his speech-tags
    betrays it at once.  About half of the 15,000 words of this story are
    dialogue, at a minimum estimate, and in the 7,500 words of
    miscellaneous yatter, the characters actually *say* something only
    twenty-seven times.  For the rest of the yarn, they shout (six times),
    repeat, snap (twice), order (four times), stammer, observe (five
    times), ask (sixteen times), lecture, argue, "half-whisper," muse,
    call, sigh (four times), nod, agree (three times), report (three
    times), cry, yell, command, bark, scream (twice), guess, state (twice,
    both times "flatly"), add, suggest, chide, propose, announce, explain,
    exclaim, admit, growl, chuckle (twice), sneer, answer, mutter (twice),
    resume, gasp, bellow (twice), roar (twice), grunt, quote, fume, write
    (twice), continue, and blare--a total of 89 more or less legitimate
    substitutes for "said", not counting about an equal number of
    illegitimate ones which we'll get to below.

        Obviously, Mr. ____ has in his possession a table or book of such
    substitutes, either compiled by himself or bought with good money, and
    he is using it to give his dialogue "variety."  There are many reasons
    why this is a self-defeating project, of which three are important.
    For one thing, it is over-emphatic.  Mr. _____ has never met any group
    of people who used so many different tones of voice in conversation,
    and neither has anybody else.  Such an assemblage of "said" substitutes
    cannot fail to make the story in which it is used sound to the ear like
    five minutes before feeding time in a bear pit.  Secondly, it is
    redundant.  All sixteen of the speeches tagged by Mr. _____ with the
    word "asked" end with question-marks; that is sufficient.  When a
    character repeats a word after another character, we do not need to be
    told that "he repeated"; we can see that.  When a character says "N-No,
    sir," it is wasted ink to add, "he stammered."

        Third, it inevitably leads even writers less tone-deaf than Mr.
    _____ into morasses of approximation and bollixed construction.  It is
    only a short step from the dubious "he half-whispered" to a speech-tag
    like "he tinned," which is meaningless unless it is soldering you are
    writing about.  (How, I wonder, did Mr. _____ manage to leave out that
    favorite speech-tag of lady corn-huskers, "he husked?")  Then you
    abandon tags which represent sounds (although these are the only
    legitimate reasons for using speech-tags other than "said"--it is
    impossible, for instance, to suggest in the speech itself that the
    character is whispering) and begin to substitute facial expressions
    ("he smiled," "he beamed," "he smirked," "he sneered"--what a
    procession into hysteria!) or gestures ("he winced," "he shrugged").
    Pretty soon you are turning nouns ("he understated") or adjectives ("he
    flustered") into verbs, and your gestures have left the realm of
    emotional expression altogether ("he pointed").  The final step in this
    dismal process--and Mr. _____ takes them all, all the way out to the
    end--is to start dropping entire sentences into the middle of your
    speeches, sentences which have nothing at all to do with your
    characters' manner of speaking, but instead only tell what *else* they
    are doing while they are talking, and hence split their speeches in two
    without taking any part in them.  This results in a text which reads,
    as Mr. _____'s frequently does, like a freshman translation from the
    German.

Later in the same collection of reviews and discussions, Blish returned
to the subject in discussing a much better story.  At this point he
quotes a bit (secondhand via James Thurber's _The Years With Ross_)
from another view:

        I repeat, this is not an exclusive Atheling [Blish] prejudice,
    though I was complaining about it in _Writer's Digest_ a good fifteen
    years ago.  Five years before that, unbeknownst to me, Wolcott Gibbs
    was telling _New Yorker_ writers:

            Word "said" is O.K.  Efforts to avoid repetition by inserting
        "grunted," "snorted," etc., are waste motion and offend the pure in
        heart.

        Similarly, Gibbs noted that

            ...writers always use too many adverbs.  On one page I found 11
        modifying the verb "said."  "He said morosely, violently,
        eloquently, so on."  Editorial theory should probably be that a
        writer who can't make his context indicate the way his character is
        talking ought to be in another line of work.  Anyway, it is
        impossible for a character to go through all these emotional states
        one after the other.  Lon Chaney might be able to do it, but he is
        dead.

Blish is certainly not always right, but usually worth reading; and IMNAAHO
he hit the bull's-eye on this one.

Thanks very much for the excerpts!  I got a few chuckles out of some of the
sardonic comments (he said smilingly :-).  If I ever decide to write something
I'll try to keep this in mind.

I enjoy the chance to talk or write with as much precision, nuance, and just
plain fun as possible.  Often, in ordinary speech, I try not to alienate a
person who may have less education than I do.  After all, that doesn't make
them any less intelligent or interesting.  It took me many years to get com
fortable enough with slang idiom and simple language to develop such relation
ships.  Since then, my command of formal language has slipped quite a bit, but
I still get great pleasure out of the "taste" of it.  And I HATE the ersatz
version that shows up on the evening news, with "utilize", "disbersal of
funds (oops, that was the right one; the error mentioned was "dispersal") adn
all those pretentious ways of letting us know someone is talking.  Sigh!

I tend to take the approach characterized by the statement
        "Vocabulary: Use it or lose it!"

        But I also tend to use words that I think will best express the 
concept I'm trying to communicate.  If only I could learn to use short 
sentences more frequently without losing effectiveness, I'd be all set...

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