Fun with hed dialect
Like any other dialect, headlines are more rule-bound than they sometimes appear to the casual observer. An entertaining and instructive sample from Fox News:
'Winkler tried to pass bad checks'
It looks really weird. If you're used to reading American news, it looks like either a direct quote or a scare quote. It's neither. At a guess, I'd say it's Fox lapsing into British hedspeak, in which quotes are a standard way of summarizing an assertion (a common way to do it here is with the colon, as in Witness: Winkler tried to pass bad checks).
It's a bit out of tune even for that, since the British generally leave the subject out of the summary:
Ross ‘faces jail sentence as she admits drink-driving’
Ross is Diana Ross, who we can probably agree is a headline name. Whether Mary Winkler is a hed name isn't a dialect issue but a shop-style issue; in Fox World, where runaway wives are standard fare, apparently she is.
Here's an example with a non-celeb:
Man ‘kept dead victim as trophy in storage unit’
A part-time musician with an interest in websites about violent sex murdered a teacher to satisfy his “macabre” fantasies, a court heard yesterday.
Graham Coutts then hid the body of 31-year-old Jane Longhust in a storage unit and visited “his trophy” regularly.
Sometimes part of the verb falls out of the summary:
Writer is ‘killed by face op’
And sometimes an attribute of the main actor ends up included:
164 ‘killed by Nazi fiend, 86’
A frail 86-year-old man has been accused of murdering 164 people in Nazi-occupied Slovakia during World War Two.
British heds also take a lot more liberties with hauling stuff around from the end of prepositional phrases than we do:
Nude pic row vicar resigns
When you throw in a relative clause, it gets out-and-out kinky:
Storm after FA let manslaughter coach teach kids
(A "manslaughter coach" isn't like a "strength and conditioning coach"; it's a coach who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.)
Just another reason Fox-watching is so much fun. You never know what they're going to do next.
'Winkler tried to pass bad checks'
It looks really weird. If you're used to reading American news, it looks like either a direct quote or a scare quote. It's neither. At a guess, I'd say it's Fox lapsing into British hedspeak, in which quotes are a standard way of summarizing an assertion (a common way to do it here is with the colon, as in Witness: Winkler tried to pass bad checks).
It's a bit out of tune even for that, since the British generally leave the subject out of the summary:
Ross ‘faces jail sentence as she admits drink-driving’
Ross is Diana Ross, who we can probably agree is a headline name. Whether Mary Winkler is a hed name isn't a dialect issue but a shop-style issue; in Fox World, where runaway wives are standard fare, apparently she is.
Here's an example with a non-celeb:
Man ‘kept dead victim as trophy in storage unit’
A part-time musician with an interest in websites about violent sex murdered a teacher to satisfy his “macabre” fantasies, a court heard yesterday.
Graham Coutts then hid the body of 31-year-old Jane Longhust in a storage unit and visited “his trophy” regularly.
Sometimes part of the verb falls out of the summary:
Writer is ‘killed by face op’
And sometimes an attribute of the main actor ends up included:
164 ‘killed by Nazi fiend, 86’
A frail 86-year-old man has been accused of murdering 164 people in Nazi-occupied Slovakia during World War Two.
British heds also take a lot more liberties with hauling stuff around from the end of prepositional phrases than we do:
Nude pic row vicar resigns
When you throw in a relative clause, it gets out-and-out kinky:
Storm after FA let manslaughter coach teach kids
(A "manslaughter coach" isn't like a "strength and conditioning coach"; it's a coach who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.)
Just another reason Fox-watching is so much fun. You never know what they're going to do next.
posted by fev at 7:05 PM
2 Comments:
"Fun."
We had a British copy editor at the Sun-Sentinel who routinly sent over heds of this nature. The one that lasted as an example of what not to do: Party beating death man...
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