"After" in headlines

[TheDustyZebra]

Mouse's revived thread on "then", which led through the whiches and into the befores, reminded me of this pet peeve I've been developing lately.

I work at a newspaper, and we print for many area publishers, so I see a lot of headlines even without counting all the Yahoo news and related stories. It just drives me crazy how the trend has moved toward "after" in headlines. It's almost never correct, usually with hilarious (to me) results:

"Man killed after truck rolls" Really? He rolled his truck, and then somebody came along and killed him? Now that's what I call a bad day!

 

[Arkose]

"Man killed after truck rolls" Really? He rolled his truck, and then somebody came along and killed him? Now that's what I call a bad day!

Agreed. I mean the story really can be anything. "Man killed after truck rolls," well, who rolled the truck? Did the truck roll over the body?

I am not sure why this is done, maybe its the available space, but it doesn't tell you what the article is about.

going through my paper I see a headline "The Clarmont restaurant closes after 65 years," which is obviously the correct way to use the word 'after.'

 

[HareBrain]

I work at a newspaper

Aha! Then you can answer my many-years-burning question.

Is this sentence construction really as common in American newspaper headlines as The Onion seems to suggest:

Man eats year-old ham, dies.

Is it just to save space?

 

[Brian G Turner]

Online at least, headlines aren't intended to be grammatically correct. Their main purpose is usually to try and intrigue the casual surfer into clicking and reading something, thus bringing in ad revenue.

 

[Ökuþórr]

"Man killed after truck rolls" Really? He rolled his truck, and then somebody came along and killed him? Now that's what I call a bad day!

Nope. He rolled his truck, then died.

"Man breaks hip after fall" You don't assume he fell, was fine, then someone came along and stomped on him, or he got up then broke someone elses hip Man rolled his truck, resulting in his death.

Agreed. I mean the story really can be anything. "Man killed after truck rolls," well, who rolled the truck? Did the truck roll over the body?

I am not sure why this is done, maybe its the available space, but it doesn't tell you what the article is about.

going through my paper I see a headline "The Clarmont restaurant closes after 65 years," which is obviously the correct way to use the word 'after.'

It tells you the article is about a man who died after rolling his truck. If you go into the article expecting a man who dropped dead after covering his truck in bread rolls, or a man who died attempting to roll his truck around, then I'd say the problem isn't with the headline it's with the reader.

Come on people, I know we all like to complain or nitpick now and then, but this? If someone reads the headline "Man killed after truck rolls" and doesn't know what it means, instead of nitpicking, we should all be impressed that that someone managed to actually read the headline.

(BTW, not meant to be insulting to anyone)

 

[TheTomG]

"Monty flies back to front"

Best to be amused by such things rather than irritated

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

From that article:


In headlines

Newspaper headlines are written in a telegraphic style (headlinese) which often omits the copula and therefore lends itself to syntactic ambiguity, usually of the garden path type. The name 'crash blossoms' was proposed for these ambiguous headlines by Dan Bloom and Mike O'Connell in the Testy Copy Editors discussion group in August 2009 based on a headline "Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms".

The Columbia Journalism Review regularly reprints such headlines in its "The Lower case" column, and has collected them in the anthologies "Squad helps dog bite victim" and "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge."

Many purported crash blossoms are actually apocryphal or recycled. One celebrated one from World War I is "French push bottles up German rear"; life imitated art in the Second World War headline "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up German Rear".


Poor Germans. For having their military maneuvers curtailed so.

 

[Phyrebrat]

Maybe the truck rolls were consumed by said man 'after' their 'best by' date...

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Well, all of my pet peeves are more amusement than irritation. There's very little in this world that doesn't amuse me in some fashion. Some people..., and all that. And of course I know what they are trying to say -- but my point is, in grammatical incorrectness, they *aren't* saying what they're trying to say. For online, that's perfectly understandable -- gotta love the Yahoo headline yesterday, "Weird 'winged structure' found in ancient Rome", leading one to think of spaceships, when indeed it was a building with "wings". Gotcha to click, didn't we?

 

[Toby Frost]

I now have a mental image of some very angry commando-type fellow waving a beer bottle and shouting "Invade this!"

There's also a famous (and I'm pretty sure real) piece of cricket commentary including the words "The batsman's Holding; the bowler's Willey".

 

[TheTomG]

Ah my humor is on such a low level That had me laughing out loud Toby. Why yes, I did grow up on Benny Hill and Carry On films, how did you guess?