Witty and pertinent observations on matters of great significance
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Incoherent jottings on total irrelevancies
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All of the aboveEats, Shoots and Prints
In the same issue of the Guardian that had the Terry Jones and Rebecca Front articles, there was this wonderful headline:
Apartment block ruled too high to be bulldozed
I became rather confused when I read the article and discovered that the block in question was, in fact, to be bulldozed. Then I realised that it should have read
Apartment block ruled "too high" to be bulldozed
Which caused me to recall the other wonderful consequences of unpunctuated headline compression, such as
Heating For Old Bill Fails
Poor old Bill....
Drive to Ban Horse Whipping Mushrooms
Actually it's surprisingly hard to punctuate that in any way that clarifies the (presumed) meaning.
Chinese in Car Clash
No comment!
British Push Bottles Up Germans
Monty Flies Back To Front
and the best of all
Foot To Head Arms Body
posted by Rob @ 01:24
4 Comments:
Foot to Head Arms Body is just genius - was some copy editor having a particular "lets have a laugh" day?
Thank God I had put down my tea cup before reading that stuff! Brilliant.
The late and much-missed Fritz Spiegel made a feature of collecting these gems. Apparently they were usually caused by mistranscription of copy which was phoned in to the office by the journos. One of my personal favourites was a reference to Mozart's Symphony No 32. The symphony is quite short. But not as short as it was once described: "Mozart's little thirty-second symphony."
The best of THAT variety was on some American paper where the style sheet instructed copywriters to avoid abbreviations and to expand them. Which led to the advertisement of a concert featuring Beethoven's Mass Incorporated.
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