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Readers say find headline syntax weird
A news story at Reuters last week had a striking bit of syntax in its headline: This unorthodox grammatical construction is not unusual in headlines, but I didn’t make a note of it before. A quick...
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Departing wisdom
*[click to enlarge] * It took me a moment to figure out this headline in today’s Irish Times. I wondered if it might be a novel or obscure sense of depart in sports journalism that had escaped my...
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Fears crawling, crash blossoming
This headline on the front page of today’s Guardian caught my eye for reasons both ecological and syntactic. See what you make of it before reading on: In normal prose it might read: There are fears...
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Passive voice peeving and ignorance
Despite all the solid, readily available information on the passive voice, there remains a great deal of misinformation and confusion about it. This confusion, far from being limited to...
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On foot of an Irish idiom
In a comment on my post about 12 Irish English usages, Margaret suggested that I write about the Irish expression on foot of. It was a good idea: the phrase is not widely known outside Ireland and is...
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Headline trials halted
This headline appeared on the front page of the Guardian website last weekend and came to my attention via Mercedes Durham on Twitter: Vaccine trials halted after patient fell ill restart It’s quite...
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Unlikely syntax will lead to clarity
This Reuters story about monkeypox, published on 30 May 2022, has an unfortunate ambiguity in its headline: The same headline appeared on sites syndicating the report, like Yahoo! News and Nasdaq, and...
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