When reading about telegraphese I found myself intrigued by headlinese as well. Both styles attempt to pack accurate meaning into a small space, but newspaper headlines have some of their own conventions that I thought would make for an interesting blog post.

Syntactic Conventions of Headlinese

Here are some of the syntactic conventions of headlinese listed by Wikipedia:

• articles and forms of “to be” omitted
• verbs in present tense
• conjunction “and” replaced by commas
• people referred to by surnames only
• organizations referrred to by metonymy
• abbreviations, contractions, acronyms used
• no periods
• single quotation marks denote unsubstantiated claims.

As you can imagine, short words are used as much as possible, sometimes in unconventional ways. I love that these “thin synonyms” are sometimes called thinneryms! Some headlines are even created by simply stacking nouns (probably not the most effective technique for conveying a clear message!).

Crash Blossoms

No doubt you’ve heard some of the humorous results of headlinese. Did you know that these are called crash blossoms? The term comes from a 2009 headline in Japan Today, “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms.”

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines

When clicking about on Wikipedia I also learned that Betteridge’s Law of Headlines is the maxim that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” Journalists tend to use a yes-no question as a headline when they don’t have the facts to make a positive assertion. If you are wondering, the adage is named after British technology journalist Ian Betteridge, although the idea had been around long before he wrote about it in 2009.

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

This concept is not directly related to headlinese, but I’m squeezing it in because I find it so interesting. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, coined by American author and filmmaker Michael Crichton, can be defined as “the phenomenon of experts believing news articles written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, yet acknowledging that articles written in the same publication within their fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding.” (Humorously Crichton wrote, “I refer to it by this name because I once discussed it with [physicist] Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.”)

Do you have any funny headlines to share?