Headlines in the papers tell of fighting in the streets

[venta]

I do try not to harp on about grammar. I really do. A lot of the time someone misses out an apostrophe and hey, it's wrong, but I knew what they meant. I know my punctuation isn't always perfect either.

But, dear BBC, you are a reputable journalistic institution. And that missing hyphen completely changed the meaning of the headline.

Child killer Robert Black found guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy tells me that Robert Black, who is under 18, is guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy.

What you meant was Child-killer Robert Black found guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy, ie Robert Black, a convicted killer of children, is guilty of murdering Jennifer Cardy.

Flippin' sort it out.

I do take it as read that, due to the law of St Sod, I will have misplaced at least one apostrophe in this post.

Comments

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

language_log mutters about this sort of thing quote a lot. These days I'm a connoisseur; I look out for the headlines with three or more meanings :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Reinterpreting the headlines to my own definition of the story is the best bit of reading any online news source. The Fail is extremely good fun for this, not least because their headlines rarely have any bearing on the story attached.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Also, they have occasional attacks of HEADLINE NOUN OVERUSE SHOCK!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Reinterpreting headlines for pleasure and profit is one thing - usually I'm aware as I read something that it's open to one or more readings. This threw me, though, because I genuinely misunderstood. The headline was a fairly sensible, exigetic statement that just happened to be quite wrong.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I have occasionally had trouble parsing their headlines due to being unsure which of the nouns I should read as verbs :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

*nod* There are two stories on the Fail site at the moment that use "child sex" in their headlines. One says "child sex probe", referring to an adult who was reported for alleged sexual activity with a child. The other says "child sex attackers", meaning children who allegedly took part in a sex attack. [The victim is also a child but the focus of the story is clearly the age and demeanour of the attackers, not the victim, so I'm pretty sure that's the way they're intending the headline to be read.] No consistency, and yes, it's genuinely confusing at times. At other times they use "child sex" to mean "consensual sex between under-16s", an entirely separate concept, which is also unhelpful and confusing.

I think "child-killer" would not be particularly helpful in the first headline - and "child killer" certainly isn't - because either the named victim is a child, in which case it's redundant to call the convicted killer a child-killer in the headline, or he has previously been convicted of killing a child and this named victim is an adult, in which case it's confusing and also somewhat irrelevant. But why let that get in the way of whipping up a good furore, eh?

[venta.livejournal.com]

It might be useful to clarify that not only has he murdered this child, but he has also been previously convicted of killing children (which is in fact the case). But I agree, even correctly punctuated, "child-killer kills child" isn't really news :)

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

It's not just the papers.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Dog-biting man bites dog!

[venta.livejournal.com]

What a particularly fine example :)

I actually did laugh out loud. Though kind of quietly.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh lordy. When I started to read the actual story, and discovered Jack Straw was speaking "on behalf of the angel Gabriel" I thought how foolish I'd been to fall for what was clearly a satire, not the BBC at all...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Our local branch of Nandos has a blackboard outside with an arrow pointing into the restaurant the slogan "Man eating chicken!"

It makes me happy :)

(Though not actually happy enough to go in and eat there, it seems.)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

the law of St Sod

This is actually an identified sub-law, Muphry's.

Hyphenating compound modifiers seems to have practically disappeared from English usage. I wonder if there was a chort of kids who were taught to shun them? In the academic copy-editing I occasionally do, a large part of my work is putting them in to remove just such ambiguity.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I certainly wasn't taught how to use them. I shuffled by for years putting them/taking them out by instinct, and finally had the rule explained to me by someone for whom English was their third language. She was German (in fact, she still is) and had actually been taught rules of English grammar considerably more thoroughly than I had.

(I mean, it's not even like the rule is very complicated, once you know it exists...)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I was quite alarmed by a Swiss friend's understanding of the rules of English grammar vs my own.

Sad to say, I was actually taught a bit of grammar at school, but have since learnt that it was almost all wrong. For my first two secondary years we had a Geography teacher taching us English, and she was very keen to impart all sorts of nonsense she'd picked up goodness knows where. None of the actual English teachers I had subsequently paid any attention to grammar at all.