Today in random headlines
The BBC's link is broken, but other sites that attended to the story provide the lede, or something like it:
The UK government could raise at least £500m a year by capping the amount of profit tobacco companies can make from cigarettes, academics say.
Pointing, I guess, to the idea that there's some sort of call to regulate some aspect of tobacco in some way that would resemble the way water is regulated.
I'm especially interested in our British colleagues' response: Did this one make any sense without the story?
Labels: bbc
posted by fev at 7:10 AM
3 Comments:
It made immediate sense to me, though I appreciate how odd its phrasing is. I'm Irish rather than British, but fairly used to this kind of syntax.
I think it's pretty opaque, but if you're used to British headlines you can just about parse it, I reckon. Although even once you have – and come to the same interpretation that you did – you'll still have to click on the link to confirm.
Those claim quotes are a bit of a problem - really, the attribution applies to all of the first four words, and putting it round just two is a big potential stumbling block. 'Tobacco' would be a clearer word to use than 'smoking', if it would fit, as well. 'REGULATE TOBACCO LIKE WATER' CALL might be a slight improvement for comprehensibility.
I think Mr Carey is right that the head is odd, and that Mr Latham is right about the problem of where the quotes are placed. Mr Latham's re-subbed version makes perfect sense to me; the original took a second reading.
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