Call your doctor if ...

I'm not at all sure this is good for the brand here, but -- it looks like we have a candidate for Meta-Elongated Yellow Fruit of the (still fairly young) Century:

Gill’s not the only naysayer. One Reddit user recounted a harrowing, cautionary tale where he used a banana skin to masturbate and allegedly ended up “falling in the mess I made, hit my head on the toilet and barely lived to tell the tale.”

However, supporters of the organic orgasm inducer feel it’s too good to pass up. 

Yes, we could quibble: organic bananas are usually another 20 cents a pound down at the local grocery, and who's to say the Post's generic illustration is a certified organic banana? And is there something a little ... well, since it's the Murdoch press, can we say a little anti-American? -- about "banana skin" in the preceding graf? That's because the story is a pickup from The Sun:

On the bright side, it isn't the Post regaling you with Tales of Brave Giuliani.

Reverse double suplex

The Fair 'n' Balanced Network really had the snowflakes on the run Friday morning, didn't it? Or ... what did that frontpage spot look like 12 hours later?

 Let's try to get a few more wrestling metaphors into the hed there, shall we?

 That's better.

Anyway, the story:

Wrestler turned international movie star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson body-slammed a British tabloid on Friday for posting what he called a “fabricated” interview featuring him bashing “snowflakes.”

Johnson took to Instagram Friday evening to “set the record straight” over a story published earlier in the day by The Daily Star. In the interview, he was quoted as lamenting the rise of snowflake culture and criticizing millennials’ need to search for reasons to be offended.

“Earlier today, online, an interview dropped with me, apparently it was with me, where I was insulting and criticizing millennials,” Johnson said in a video posted to his social media page. “The interview never took place. Never happened. Never said any of those words. Completely untrue. 100 percent fabricated.”

Wait -- he's saying a redtop out-and-out fabricated a story? About a CELEBRITY? Well, why is that our concern?

Media outlets, including Fox News, had picked up the story, in which the actor was said to have derided millennials for doing a disservice to war heroes by constantly complaining.

Fox was a little more enthusiastic than it lets on. It had already spun a companion story off the original fabrication before the rebuttal* caught up:

In fairness ("to be sure" is the technical journalistic term), it's technically possible that the Daily Star has exactly the exclusive it claims and the craven wrestler is running for cover on his agent's orders**:

He "laid the smackdown" on PC softies in an exclusive chat with the Daily Star.

While The People’s Champion applauds the fact nowadays anyone can “be who they want to be” the musclebound man-mountain raged at the constant offence snowflakes take from everything.

The legendary wrestler turned actor says it does a disservice to war heroes who fought for freedom of speech.

I don't keep up a lot with Dwayne Johnson's unscripted speech, so maybe somebody he's wont to lapse into British English collective noun agreement:

... “So many good people fought for freedom and equality - but this generation are looking for a reason to be offended.

So it sounds like we ought to to go with "at minimum, partially fabricated"; the Star is going to laugh all the way to the bank anyway, and Fox will have to go back to stoking its own outrages. But it's fun to note how a verb like "body-slams" can switch sides in such a hurry.***

* Both URLs point to the same story now, alas.
** See the comments at Fox; it takes a while to get down to the point where the text is updated, but it's worth the effort.
*** Maybe it means something different at Fox when you put in the hyphen than when you leave it out.

Kids these days

Everyone's a little different when it comes to getting those pesky large numbers into headlines. You can be extra-formal and insist on the zeroes, or you can guess that your audience can figure out B for "billion" and T for "trillion." You can use M for "million," unless the greisly voice of your first editing teacher is shouting from beyond the grave that M really means "thousand," for which you can't use T (above), so you probably fall back on K.

G for thousand is a little more tabloid (in the spinning-front-page-indicates-passage-of-time sense), partly because it's tightly restricted. It doesn't mean "thousand," it means "thousand dollars" (or pounds, for which the OED has a cite from 1958). So somebody at Fox reached one shelf too far for the hed above, but you have to admit it has sort of a grapefruit-in-the-face charm to it.

Martinis, steaks and cold-blooded belles

So with the UN slapping America in the face, Republicans finally wising up to the Kenyan usurper's Mideast perfidy and Massster's beautiful tax cuts held hostage by those pesky budget rules, what do you figure should have been the world's fourth most important story on Thursday afternoon?

Aw, you peeked. Having done so, though, you might have wondered how the elements of this story fell into place so naturally, so let's have a look:

She’ll drink to that!

The Latvian woman who watched her fiancé drown in the Hudson River walked out of prison Thursday — and celebrated with a martini and steak lunch.

There's no "police said" or "according to eyewitnesses" or "Fox News can reveal" (though there is that delicate accent on "fiancé," in case you've forgiven the French for anything in the past few decades). But there is an outline of the structure under which we're supposed to understand stuff. "Walked out of prison Thursday" is an easy claim to verify. "Martini and steak lunch" is close, but .. hang on a little and we'll get back to the martinis. "Celebrated" is actually a bit different from what you see in sports photo captions, where at least people are usually jumping up and down or something. As for who's drinking to what -- well, you can't call it a lie, because there's nothing for it to be true or false about. It's a framing device. It doesn't tell you what to think, but it tells you how to think about the things you're poised to learn.

Watching one's fiance drown, of course, is substantially different from drowning one's fiance; both have the makings of a good country song, but to make sense of the second paragraph, you need to know in advance that this isn't your ordinary Latvian woman. She's the one ... oh, come on, you read about it a couple years ago, it's on the tip of your tongue, she's the one in that story! So now you're ready to look at how tabloids make news. Indeed, let's just go ahead and shift over to the New York Post, the Murdoch stablemate from which Fox appropriated this story:

The part that Fox added to the hed -- the steak dinner -- seems to be the better attested,* but what the heck. How many martinis, and how do we know?
Read more »

Outrage and nothingness

Breakthrough in transatlantic headline relations! Fox advances the British existential hed to the point of nothingness: an Outrage As story with zero outrage.

The existential is one of those bits of national headline dialect that look bizarre to the non-native speaker but usually aren't out-and-out misleading. (There are exceptions: "Anger at Lockerbie bomber welcome," for example.) Just stick a "There is ..." at the front of the headline and things are fairly easy to follow. It's common on some registers of the UK press:

Outrage as politician uses Auschwitz gas chamber as "stage" in "obscene" video message 'for America'

Outrage as nuclear power station holds bikini contest with cooling tower photo shoot to choose new intern

Outrage as Ryanair axes 2,000 flights to boost punctuality

Outrage as New York school tells students they should masturbate to avoid carrying out sex attacks on nights out
Read more »

Happy birthday, H.P. Lovecraft!

Makes perfect sense to me. Size-wise, the Building Horror ought to fall somewhere between the Dunwich Horror and the Thing on the Doorstep, and either SoHo was feeding it or someone else fed it to SoHo -- either way, it's basically, run.

I expect it's a lot more prosaic in the land of the redtops, where readers can presumably untangle an expletive noun pile (Soho Hols Yob Drinks Ban Row) before breakfast: There has been a horror at a federal building in SoHo. For the rest of us: Loose after its aeons-long imprisonment and ravening for delight ...

Nouning weirds language

By the standards of the redtops, this wouldn't even count as a particularly interesting noun pile, except for -- you know, the noun. And even that is pretty straightforward: A confession becomes a "fess" in the same way a slaying becomes a "slay." The only odd part -- unless the Post is now in the habit of complaining about Those Kids using their 'phones on the crosstown 'bus -- is the apostrophe that marks the clipping in 'fess.

The inside hed also helps you infer a few things about tabloid attribution practice. The quote in the story is "What the hell did I do? . . . Killed them all of course," so the more fastidious version leaves "I" out of the quote. And the standard Old Editor response to a televised admission is that it's a confession when it's admitted in court, not when it's given to some goober with a microphone -- hence the second pair of quotes around "confession." Maybe libel lawyers know better than to think anyone believes the front page anyway?

As for why a distant slay (even one attributed to "bizarre real estate heir and longtime murder suspect Robert Durst") is jostling for frontpage space with basketball, while the usurper is still plotting to give away the nuclear candy store and the Hildebeest* is frantically subverting justice -- well, that's why we have tabloids, innit?

* Almost certainly not coined by either of the Obamas, in case you're scoring along at home. Consider the source.

In the land of the tabloids

Just another day in the City that Never Sleeps, huh?

Alex Rodriguez smacks of phoniness, and unsurprisingly, New Yorkers are seeing right through his latest attempt to set things right: a handwritten apology he published Tuesday afternoon.
 
Yep, gotta get up pretty early in the morning t put one over on those New Yorkers! Unless you're wondering what the guy in the tie is doing there (since he doesn't actually appear in the story or anything). Wonder what the inset says?

Well, that clears a lot of things up.

Grumpy Cat remembers the Maine

Q: What do you do when a potentially GREAT story from the intarwebs has, you know, a few too many hedges?
A: Make up some more stuff!

Which appears to be how we got from this lede, posted online Friday by the Torygraph:

A young woman in eastern Ukraine has provoked outrage by allegedly posting a picture of herself on Instagram using a mascara wand looted from the crash site of Flight MH17.

... to the front of today's Post:

She didn’t bat an eye when she painted her lashes with a dead woman’s mascara.
Read more »

He can't do that to our pledges

Only we can stir random paranoia among our audience do that to our pledges!

The News has a point here, after a fashion. Next time it could be a BOMB, especially if it's a bomb about the size and weight of a few king-size sheets being carried by -- what's that, New York's Hometown Newspaper? -- "a skateboard-toting youth and four pals." You can't be too careful about these things.

Unless you're, you know, some rube from Chicago who doesn't understand what it's like to live in the most important city in the world. How did it sound at the Daily News back on, say, March 26?

New Yorkers got a chilling wake up call Tuesday about just how badly terrorists want to strike the city.

And how badly is that?
Read more »

Gotham tab noun pile spread preposition link

The monarchist takeover of the New York Post has been an open secret for some time now, but this one from the New York Daily News comes as a bit of a surprise. It packs a lot of redtop -- claim quotes, two noun piles, and a verb-replacing preposition -- into six words.

Are they driving on the wrong side of the road up there too?

Message fail

Looks like somebody at the New York Post didn't get the message from the home planet: Negotiating with terrorists BAD!

Great minds think ... wait, no

Add to the list of Things To Never, Ever Forget About Hed Writing:

If it's the first thing that comes to mind, slow down and wait for a second thing to come to mind.

Today in claim quotes

Submitted for discussion: What are those suspiciously foreign quote marks doing on the front page of an (allegedly) American fishwrap?

"Bus slay punk," on its own, is a distinctly American tabloid noun phrase. It's nowhere near a genuine noun pile; the only thing British about it is the use of quotation marks to indicate -- in Ten Minutes Past Deadline's excellent summary -- "a newsworthy assertion made by a third party about which the news organisation is reserving judgment." That function is clear in "Under-fives death rate 'high in UK'," on the BBC home page even as we speak: there isn't room to attribute the assertion, but the claim quotes signal that the attribution is coming.

There's the odd part. Calling someone a punk might be rude, but calling him a killer would pose some actual legal risk, so a decent respect for the publisher's checkbook calls for a little attention to the niceties. If that's the point, though, the claim quotes aren't just in the wrong headline dialect, they're attributing the wrong thing. The one thing that doesn't appear to be in question in the Post's story is that a "bus slay" took place. Reserving judgment on that point is less a problem here than declaring him guilty in the body type, which the Post does with its usual glee.

What do you say, British readers? Do the claim quotes work correctly here?

Hed of the week: Don't let the games not begin

Somewhere in the twilight between claim quote and paraphrase, the remarkable Daily Mail Online manages to make a perfectly adequate quote both longer and, um, exactly backward:

'Nobody has to stand centre ice in front of a million people and put an entire career on the line for eight minutes of their life when they've been doing it for 20-some years,' he said, after placing eighth in the free skate for an overall 12th position between the two programmes.

'And if you think that that's not hard, then you're a damn idiot.'

I'm actually starting to see a competitive advantage in the Mail's hed stylings. You really do have to read the whole story to figure out what's going on in the display type.

 

Tab hed merge row 'widening gyre'

Might as well just turn Old Glory upside-down in the nameplate there, New York Post. No real American rimrat would have referred to the recently departed actor as "Seymour Hoffman" in a hed. Especially since none of the Post's stories on the matter seem to use anything but "Hoffman."

Why this assumption about appropriate second references for men known by three names is so British-sounding is still a mystery (and thanks to all who checked in with observations last time it came up). It does seem to work best with middle names that could go either way -- even the Sun probably wouldn't call Jim Ed Brown "Ed Brown" in heds. But apparently you guys over there think we're up to something over here that, in general, we aren't.

Redtop hed dialect shock merge horror

Is the austere beauty of the American tabloid hed becoming indistinguishable from the baroque splendor of the London redtops? That's the impression I get from the claim quotes here.

Owing in part to their libel laws, I expect the British would avoid some of the characterizations in text:

Deranged suspect Sean Farrell, 24, called his grandmother after killing his mom — a nurse who helped care for sick children — to confess, court papers show.

“Sean told me he was scared and confused,” stunned granny Letitia Dunn told cops, according to documents.

... but the real interest here is the hed -- particularly the quotes and the lack of the comma. Input from both sides of the ocean is welcome: are we losing the core elements that make our tabs different?

Today among the weasels

On the bright side, the New York Post doesn't just fear scary brown people when they're, you know, Muslims or Arabs. It fears all the other Asians too!

Should you be wondering, "Viv" isn't somebody named Vivian. It's somebody whose family name is Mark-Viverito. Good thing you already know that if you read the Post.

This week in heds: British invasion

British-style heds are pretty common in the New York Post, which occasionally improves itself by importing talent from the far-distant Murdoch properties, and to a lesser extent at foxnews.com, because Fox! But when we get two distinctively British heds on the front of the News, we should think about hanging a lantern in the steeple of the Old Boston Herald or something.

At the top of the Friday page above, note the prepositional crossover in "CBS' Miller in NYPD stunner." American hed practice calls for a verb here: "NYPD terror chief choice baffles bigs" or "Intel world stunned at TV dude terror pick." The British redtops just let the preposition join the relevant NPs: "Yob brothers in hoods ban" or "Lad on jogger stabbing rap."

At the bottom is a classic noun pile, "Class lab fire horror," which may be this story but you never know, because verbs. As the inside hed and the link suggest, American practice instinctively goes for a passive verb -- "students injured" seems to get the job done -- as long as nobody is standing next to the slot and yelling about the evils of the passive voice.

How about "TV GUY IS NEW TERROR CHIEF"? You can see that construction on both sides of the ocean, and downstyle is always easier to follow than ALL CAPS, but this one's strictly American, because indefinite. The British style would be something like "TV Chris* is new Dr Who," where "TV Chris" is "that guy Chris you've seen on TV," whereas "TV Guy" is "some guy you might know from TV."**

Anyway, observations are welcome: Shock horror outrage, are our tabloid dialects merging?

* See also "TV Henry is broke," "TV Kiefer injured in bar fight," "TV Carol sees spot where skydive daughter died," et al.
** For practice, translate: "TV Kate In Nude Sir Pic Row"

Sadly, no

Sad news for the New York Post. Not only is your "exclusive" not exclusive, but you aren't even the only tabloid in town to use "hooker-happy" as a modifier for "Spitzer."

It's always the 1940s somewhere.