Son of the Flying Verb

Spare a moment of regret for the magnificent Flying Verb -- once roaming the midlands of North American continent in its mighty flocks, now so rare even in its remaining strip of East Coast habitat that many have never seen it in the wild. So here are a few from a different research project, inspired by Ed's comment on Saturday's post.

I'm not surprised if they look especially weird to British eyes, and I'd welcome any observations about whether this specific form -- an active clause with an elided third-person* subject -- had any currency outside the US. And it makes sense to read "charges" in that example as a noun standing for "There are charges," in that British heds make very tidy use of that sort of understood existential phrase. One of my favorites:

Storm after FA let manslaughter coach teach kids

... meaning (There is a ...) or (there has been a ...)

These examples, with "take" and "cremate," don't have the ambiguity of "charges."

Pondering all that, I think I've finally started to puzzle out what the Flying Verb was doing. It's like the passive voice, only shorter and, well, more active. Any time you're tempted to begin a hed with "Officials" or "Authorities," just take the pesky subject out! "Take 2 Pictures" is one count shorter than "2 Pictures Taken," and for the second, you'd have to create two separate passive clauses, each a count longer: "Nazis Cremated And Ashes Disposed Of Secretly." In another Tribune example cited here before, "Plan Dictator If War Wipes Out Capital," you save three whole hits over "Dictator Planned..." -- and that's hard to resist.

The Canadian example, again, is different because it has a singular subject: one draft official. We don't have enough data to talk about whether that's an actual difference in hed dialect, but it'd be interesting to look into.


If it's so handy, why did the Flying Verb go extinct? Well, first, it isn't exactly the ivory-billed woodpecker. You can still see it occasionally if you keep an eye on the New York tabloids, and a hybridized version -- with an explicit subject in a neighboring deck, as in the "Reveals:" hed at right -- even shows up in some broadsheets, like the Washington Times.

Further observations and comments, of course, are welcome.


* I expect that the understood "you"-- Try these three tips for tastier tomatoes! -- shows up in almost every hed dialect.

Flying verbs: A user's manual

Friends of the Flying Verb, rejoice: Now there's a journalism textbook to explain it all for you! Assuming you're on track to graduate in 1943, at least.

Under the subhead "Implied subject," here's how Radder & Stempel's "Newspaper Editing, Make-Up and Headlines"* introduces the example above:

The subject may not be expressed in the first deck. It may be implied in the first deck and expressed immediately in the second, provided it is the first word in the second deck. ... Some editors consider it bad form to run headlines in which the first deck has an implied subject.

The book cautions against using the flyer "if the verb might be understood to be in the imperative mode," and the examples have plural implied subjects: "Hear Bible Scholar" and "Rob Los Angeles Bank" (followed by "Pair Flees in Automobile"):

A few newspapers have a rule against beginning any headline with a verb, holding that even the third-person singular form might be confused with the imperative.

The section on writing heds about speeches fits the specification exactly:

... though many, if not most, shops that employed the Flying Verb were far more flexible. Here's the World's Greatest Newspaper, reporting on the dustup that eventually became Terminiello** v. Chicago:

The deck is "Three policemen injured outside hall"; I have trouble seeing them as the subject of "seize."

UK readers will be happy to know that there's also a justification for claim quotes, also from the section on reporting about speeches:

When the thought to be expressed is too long to go into the first bank with the name, some newspapers permit the copyreader to enclose the speaker's statement in quotation marks and let it stand alone in the first deck. The words need not necessarily be the exact words of the speaker. If they are not, the quotation mark merely indicates that someone made the statement.

Further insights on the flyer, or formal guidance for the art of the claim quote, always welcome. Thanks to Michael Fuhlhage*** for the loan of the textbook.

* Second edition, published in 1942. The first, in 1924, was called "Newspaper Headlines and Make-Up." Radder was a former NYT rimrat who taught at Indiana; Stempel, a student when the first edition was coming together, put in some time at the New York Sun and elsewhere before joining the academic ranks.
** "Self-styled Father Coughlin of the South," as the Trib put it.
*** The one, the only, the coiner of the phrase "Donner Party comma" for the comma of direct address ("Let's eat, Grandma").

Bizarre hed elision of the year

The best route to immortalization at the back of CJR or someplace like it isn't breaking the rules of hed elision, it's following them into the ground. That's why we never run short of stuff like "Smith gets shot at tournament" or "Player helps blind woman" to amuse colleagues and undergraduates with. Today's example, on the other hand, fits no known pattern and might represent an entirely new species of hed formation (take a bow there, Richmond Times-Dispatch). We simply don't have any idea what, or how much, or where, to fill in:
[We've] never been more at risk for fraud
Never [have you] been more at risk for fraud
Never [have there] been more at risk for fraud

Notice how normal the deck sounds in comparison to the main hed? Nobody who reads U.S. news regularly is going to trip on the missing "were" before "lost," or the use of the comma to replace "or" in "lost or stolen," or the missing "a" before "record." All those are in bounds.

A number of other standard truncations go unnoticed as well. Feature pages are particularly accepting of an understood "you can" or "you should," as in this hat trick from page 3C of today's Freep:

Decorate home with an aquarium or two
Welcome New Year with all kinds of shows and people
Be sure policy has you covered

And from the same T-D front as today's gem are two examples of an elided expletive phrase:

It's more common in U.S. feature or label heds, as at left: "[There is a] crackdown on DUI"; using it on spot news, as in the lede slot above, is rare here* but fairly common in British heds, as in these from today's Sun:
Two arrests over teen stabbing
Fears over kids' diet disaster

The redtops will also use prepositional phrases in cases where we'd try to work in a verb phrase:
Gordon Brown in poll plea

Gone, alas, are the days of the Flying Verb, as in this example (quoted by Liebling) from the glory days of the Chicago Tribune:
PLAN DICTATOR
IF WAR WIPES
OUT CAPITAL

Hed fashions come and hed fashions go. Finding a flying verb in the wild** today would be worth a call to the bird lab people at Cornell or something, but clippings like "Dems" and "reps," which would have been substandard in broadsheet hed language a few years ago, have become pretty unexceptional. The "rules" of hed language are subject to evolution and change, but you can't declare a change unilaterally and expect to be understood.

* "Headless body in topless bar" is the classic exception
** In the broadsheet world, at least; I don't see enough tabs regularly to be too certain about what they're up to.

Separated by a common headline

Two questions:

1) What's your first-glance reading of what the headline means?
2) Where are you from? (Specifically, where did you learn to read headlines?)

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Don't do this

Here's one of those annoying journalism habits that I had thought was gone with the -- I don't know, gone with the flying-verb hed* or something. How is the Daily Herald of "suburban Chicago" going to come up with a 1A story about the Blago case? Hey, let's ask some psychologists for a little armchair analysis!

Ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich's denial that anything was wrong, selling himself to reality shows, even his always-perfect hair have caused some to question his state of mind. (How do you tell Fox from real journalism? Well, when it comes to "some" ledes, you don't! But seriously -- this is a benchmark for 1A stories? Big hair makes you a nutcase?)

But now that Blagojevich's federal corruption trial reveals his interest in running for president, his jealousy of others, and his struggle to get money while he and his wife spent $400,000 on clothes over six years, some psychologists say they believe they can put a name to his mental status. (Other than the "mental status" you have to have before running for statewide office anyway?)

Specifically, two prominent Chicago psychologists said Blagojevich displays symptoms of a condition officially known as narcissistic personality disorder. (How do you mean "prominent"? Do they sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at the seventh-inning stretch? Or were they on the heavily attended citywide panel discussion on personality disorders? Or were they ...)

Dr. Daniela Schreier, a forensic psychologist at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology, said it's impossible to make a clinical diagnosis without a personal evaluation, which she has not done. (Since she's -- how do we put this? -- "right," do you suppose this would be a good time to kill the story?) But, she said, Blagojevich definitely has traits of the condition. (How long did it take for her to come up with this diagnosis? Surely the reporter wouldn't have ... I mean, surely a reporter wouldn't actually call up a prominent psychologist and plant the seed of a suggested malady? Wouldn't that require shopping around for just the right psychologists?

Scott Ambers, a Chicago psychologist, said Blagojevich appears to "hit the jackpot" in meeting the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.

If by "just right" you mean "will reliably use colorful figures of speech on demand," it looks that way.
Owing to selection bias, we don't know what "psychologists" -- even prominent Chicago ones -- think about the propriety of this. I'd like to know how many disagreed with the reporter, how many pointed out the ethical issues of doing jackleg diagnosis based on fragmentary media reports, and how many hung up on the reporter outright.** (Considering how nice "quoted as an expert source by ..." looks on the vitae, we should all plan to buy the dissidents a beer next time we see them.) And I don't know of any specific prohibitions in the assorted bits of journalism canon against enticing other professionals to bend their own ethics guidelines.

I don't think we even have to go there, because what we have here is simply crap journalism, raw and fragrant. It's a newspaper pretending to be a daytime TV show and not realizing that it's singularly lacking in noise, lights, motion and morons -- though I'm pretty close to conceding that last point.

I'm sorry for the rimrat who had to write the hed, because it's a brutal count.*** But it's nice to think, if only for a moment, that the rimrat turned to the slot and said "The specs aren't the problem. I can't write a hed because the story sucks."

* Quiz 8 in ax fest!

** It's more than possible that, having found two sources, the reporter stopped right there. (Hey, if two sources was good enough for Woodward and Bernstein ...)
*** BLAGO NUTS, SHRINKS OPINE. Happy now? 

Today in 1943: Those pesky facts

In case you didn't think history had a habit of repeating itself, have a look at what the Association of Canadian Advertisers was being told, according to the June 6 Globe and Mail:

Mr. Clark* said he was making a "frank confession" on the subject, and declared that from now on the people will have to content themselves with being given less factual data and news about the size or operations of the Canadian fighting forces. This did not mean, he said, that the Government planned to clamp down on information "but it does mean that we have to become more sensibly cautious about the extent and nature of that information."
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Emergency clue drop request

Rough night on the hed front downtown, eh?

The fun element in the lede hed here is the deck: "His lawyer hints at extortion." What's that mean when you come to it cold? Well, what does "hint at [noun]" usually mean?

"...whenever Trond encounters the mysterious Lars, who hints at violence" (Village Voice, 7/18/07)
"Try to open a business that hints at sex, drugs and rock & roll, however - in the next county, mind you - and a full-scale e-mail meltdown ensues" (Florida Times Union, 2/17/07)
"He's a different type of runner than predecessor Kenneth Darby and seems to hint at going the distance on virtually every play" (Huntsville Times, 9/2/07)
"... futuristic staccato beats full of stuttering sound effects that hint at violence" (New York Times, 4/25/05)

So when you "hint at" something, it's something you can do, or offer, or might want to do. Not, as you might find if you hang on for the 13th graf, something you go on talk radio to hint that the other side has done.

Can it get worse? Hoo hah!
Block
release
of crack
convicts
So says Mukasey:
Early outs a risk

The main hed could be one of two things. As an editorial, it'd be imperative: You should, or you must, or the Powers That Be should, do something. In what's known as a Flying Verb construction, it's a subject-free way of saying somebody or some agency has done something:
Seize Gus Hall, Vanishing Red, In Mexico*
Quiz 8 in Ax Fest
Judging from the lede:
Attorney General Michael Mukasey is to ask Congress to block the early release from prison of many of the 20,000 crack-cocaine offenders who can seek reduced sentences under a rule to take effect March 3.

... we don't know quite what to make of it. Does the deck help? Not really. "So says Mukasey" could be a slightly baroque way of trying (and failing; attribution shouldn't cross decks) to pin the opinion at top to the AG. But then whose opinion is "Early outs a risk"? The hed's trying to making two fact claims, and it only has enough attribution for one.

We could go on, but let's not.
* Yes, kiddies, we really did used to write 'em like that.

Softest barriers EVAR

Every time I think I have the claim quote figured out, a new one comes along. Here, I think it's the phrasing that gets me. The quote in the linked video is: "He was breaking down barriers that nobody suspected." There's room for "Chuck Berry 'was breaking down barriers'"; if that seems too much more opaque than the current version, there's also room to take the quotes off and add the attribution: "Chuck Berry broke down barriers, Simmons says." The down barriers, though, are going to remain a problem for me.

I expect I have trouble with "over US election hack" because I'm not a native speaker of claim quotes (fair enough; the flying verb seems pretty opaque in British headlinese too). Is "hack" what needs the attribution, or is the "over" part of the contested assertion?

Sorry these are a bit old; trying to clear out the inbox before things get any stranger in the framing of international politics.

'To the brink of war'

If you're one of those Hannity viewers who were disappointed beyond measure that you missed an ad for a documentary about the great German-American Bund rally of February 1939, relax. Here's what it looked like the following day at the World's Greatest Newspaper.

No, of course the headline doesn't want you to fight Nazis (be serious; it's the Trib in 1939). It's a classic flying verb or "implied subject" headline -- somebody fought some Nazis, but we can't tell you who and still make the hed big enough to carry the page, so calm down.* But with midtown New York "thrown into a turmoil," it still seems to have been a rather big deal, even half a continent away. A recounting of that event is what Fox News deemed "not appropriate for our air," according to the Hollywood Reporter.**

You can see how the page overall would create a bit of cognitive dissonance for the committed Fox viewer. There's a Carey Orr cartoon bashing the New Deal, but the "attacks on foreign governments" are actually "driving away our customers." There's a mayoral hopeful warning that a vote for Democrats in the mayoral primary "is a vote in support of the war-bent national Democratic administration." But the really confusing part has to be that attack on rampant executive powers in the first column:

The house*** today heard demands that President Roosevelt be stripped of the extraordinary powers granted him in "emergency" legislation during the six years of his administration.

The President was charged with dragging this nation to the brink of war because of his use of some of those powers to take sides in European and Asiatic conflicts. A special Republican committee, recently appointed to study the extraordinary powers of Mr. Roosevelt, led the attack with a request for liquidation of the Export-Import Bank as soon as is consistent with its present commitments. A bitter fight ensued when the house banking and currency committee sought approval of a resolution to continue the existence of the bank until June 30, 1941. The bank expires by law next June 30. 

Rep. Ham Fish has heard that the Ex-Im Bank "recently sent 23 million dollars to China," and he is none too pleased:

... The first purchase made by the Chinese government was 1,000 war trucks, he said. This constituted a direct violation of the neutrality policy of the United States, he charged, and put this country in the position of affronting the Japanese invaders of China.

Results in Entanglements
"This is only one instance of the manner in which the administration, through the special powers delegated to the President by a jittery congress, is involving the United States in foreign entanglements," Fish said.


Good thing Congress was exercising its authority over spending, right? Especially given that our relationship with the Japanese invaders is a good one and nobody's tougher on China than we are.

Anyway, aren't you sorry you missed the ad?

* Hint: It's the "50,000 foes of Bund held back by police" in the deck. It takes some work to figure out the Trib's style on cutoff rules under a streamer.
** Some newspapers were a little overenthusiastic. Here's the Washington Post ,Feb. 11: 

Some viewers of Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” on Monday night will get a jolting image: scenes from a rally of American Nazis in New York.

The images are meant not as promotion but as a warning: They will come as part of a 30-second spot for “A Night at the Garden,” a new Oscar-nominated documentary short about the rally of the German Bund at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1939. It was directed by the liberal-minded filmmaker Marshall Curry.
*** Lowercase "house" was Trib style.

Pronouns: The farewell tour

Shed a tear in passing for the specious pronoun count as an index of thinly veiled right-wing racism presidential narcissism. We may never see its like again -- though with a few hours left in the regular season, you don't want to rule anything out.

The pronoun meme deserves a spot in the Fake News Hall of Fame for its sheer persistence. (The flying verb in Drudge's play from last Wednesday  makes clear that this isn't a story that needs a lot of explanation.) It relies on three observations:
1) The Kenyan usurper uses first-person pronouns! Which most of us -- oops -- do pretty often.
2) The Kenyan usurper uses them N or NN or NNN times! Whether that's a proportion or a raw number, whether it's per minute or per word, or whether it's more or less than any of his predecessors, doesn't signify. GAAAAAAH!
3) Therefore narcissism! Which, sort of like the perpetual bedwetting over the Kenyan threat to "fundamentally transform" America, always ends up leading back to someone like Reagan, who used first-person pronouns with a pretty human regularity and closed out his tenure by congratulating himself on fundamentally transforming a lot more than that:

And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

Imagine what Fox News might have thought. Wait, don't.

Anyway, there's an enduring archive of pronoun madness over at Language Log. That doesn't quite get all the details, such as what we learn from how the meme spreads. Drudge's Wednesday play is from the Daily Caller, which seems to have a new aura owing to Tucker Carlson's ascent at Fox but is otherwise its same old droolery self:

President Obama referred to himself 75 times in his farewell address Tuesday night, according to a review of his prepared remarks by The Daily Caller.
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Today in clickbaiting

Doesn't the headline just fill you with the urge to click on through and see what the answer is? That seems to be the mission, at least; the Fox News website has discovered the magic of clickbaitery and is jumping in with enthusiasm.

Not too artfully, though. If you're going to have a cliffhanger in the No. 5 spot on the homepage for Super Bowl Sunday, it probably shouldn't be the same one that was in the No. 5 spot on the homepage last Monday:

 You might even think a lede that refers to the Super Bowl as "next Sunday" was a bit of a giveaway:

Whether the New England Patriots win or lose Super Bowl 53 against the Los Angeles Rams next Sunday, Tom Brady is not ready to ride off into the sunset just yet.

When asked during an interview with ESPN that aired Sunday if there was any chance his ninth Super Bowl would be his NFL swan song, Brady said: "Zero," curling his thumb and fingers into a "0" shape to emphasize the point.
 
And there's always that pesky label over the story noting that it was posted "6 days ago":

So Fox seems a little slow in getting the hang of the whole clickbaiting thing. Maybe it should put the starters back in or preach the gospel of RTFP more loudly or something.

Being of the generation for which the whole point of the headline is to tell people something they didn't know, I have a deep dislike for clickbaiting in all its forms and guises. I'm not at all sure how widely that feeling is shared. Attitudes toward headlines seem to be shaped by the routines that readers are familiar with. If the flying verb or the noun pile looks weird to you, it's probably because you haven't scarfed down half a dozen before breakfast each day for the past 20 years.

The evidence so far is that the up-and-coming wave of news consumers isn't especially bothered by clickbaiting, though there is (hey, it's clickbaiting) This One Weird Trick: Traditional heds do better on error-heavy stories, but clickbait heds do better on well-edited stories. Clickbaiting also seems to be associated with better memory for story details. You don't even want to hear about what the photos do.**

* I'm trying really hard not to say "grownup" and apparently failing.
** Yes, you do. Film at 11.

Drop the roscoe, AP

Why do writers keep writing ledes like this?

WASHINGTON - More people than ever are turning their cars into personal phone booths, with a million-and-a-half drivers gabbing on cell phones at any given time. Women and young people are the most common yakkers.

About 10 percent of the people on the road during the day are using cell phones, up from 8 percent in 2004, the government reported Thursday.

Six percent of drivers were holding the phones to their ears, up from 5 percent last year.

Probably because editors keep running them -- a couple hundred nationwide in this case, if a search for the fairly distinctive phrasing is reliable. So editors need to launch the cure: Don't run this sort of stuff, and publicly berate and humiliate the writers who turn it in.

Did the awful writing not get anybody's attention? Did anybody bother to look in a few reference books and see if "gab" and "yak"* are as anachronistic as they sound? So, first question: What's with the 1940s slang in a December 2005 lede?

On a deeper look, though, "gab" is more than just '40s slang. It's a real verb, several centuries old, meaning, per the OED, "to talk much or glibly; to chatter, prate." Thus we have the AP playing All Verbs Are Equal again. I'll be happy to assume that most of what's said on cell phones is prattle -- I'll go the NHTSA** one better and call for public horsewhipping for cell-phone-using drivers -- but the AP's cheating if it thinks it can make an even swap of a flashy verb for an accurate one.

Which gets to the more entertaining point. Any particular reason we should believe any of those figures? Hmm. By the second graf, we find it's a report from "the government," which seems to think this two-point increase is significant. And by the third graf, mirabile dictu, somebody seems to think a change from 5 percent to 6 percent is a change worth reporting.

Must be some pretty serious sampling to yield results that good, huh? Let's check the methodology:

The NHTSA survey was conducted between June 6 and June 25 at 1,200 road sites across the nation. Trained observers watched vehicles go by and charted what the driver was doing. The ages of drivers are estimates based on their observations.

Well, that's a relief. At least it was trained observers, rather than Dimbo the Flying Garden Slug and a couple of his roommates. And at least we admit that the ages are, uh, estimates. Anybody care to hazard a guess on how random the rest of the sampling is?

Again, don't misunderstand. Anything that makes people hang the [really naughty word] up and drive is fine with me, including corporal punishment, sale of offenders' firstborn to oilseed mills, and mandatory first-offense sentences of life without parole watching KOMU intersession news with high school choruses singing Christmas carols at the commercial breaks. But if we're going to campaign, let's campaign. Don't cloak it in fake statistics. Come right out and do it.

Confirmation class
After The New York Times reported, and CNN confirmed, a claim that Bush gave the National Security Agency license to eavesdrop on Americans communicating with people overseas, the president said that his actions were permissible, but that leaking the revelation to the media was illegal.

Well, that's a relief.

* Must admit, it took about four reference books to even find "yak." Sic semper people who keep stuff at the office.
** Is this really an acronym in Washington? Can you say "I'll go NHTSA one better?"

Grammar dogs write stuff

This is sort of like watching the Flying Missouri Death Carp slowly make their way toward the Great Lakes. A bizarre usage hops the fence from one press sector to another, and we're left wondering if it's just a one-off or if the damn things have started to breed.

Hed language is as rule-bound as any other dialect. Standard American heds have no problem losing the "be" verb in "2 hurt in accident" but would balk at something like "Mayor arrested after found nude" or "Boy dies after dragged by own cow." Those have generally stayed on the tabloid side of the fence. This is the first case of "being"-elision I've seen in a fishwrap that -- at least on good days -- pays some attention to being careful with hed language. I don't like it, and I hope it doesn't catch on, but as with lexical items like "drawdown" and "went missing," my opinion isn't likely to count for much.

It's hard to see "After missing for 13 years" as a space issue, because "Missing for 13 years, Barfy returns" would have been fine. Except for ... wait, how does the lede go again?

Terry and Blaine Horne had to go to a church meeting 13 years ago this summer on a beautiful hot evening.

And?

... Simba was their beautiful, less than a year old, red-coated Siberian Husky with the ice-blue eyes. (Emergency hyphen drop!)

... They came home, and Simba, with a tag around his neck that identified him as having shots at a certain place, with an ID number, was gone.

Well,the years pass (much more quickly than the story), and three weeks ago ...

She looked outside, and there in the grass, rolling in the morning dew, was the skinniest, sorriest looking excuse for a dog that might have once been red anybody ever saw.

Don't you love the puppyish enthusiasm of a relative clause on the loose? "You're a sorry looking excuse for a dog that might have once been red!" (What's taking so long with the hyphens?)

... This dog, clearly old, back leg limping, close to skin and bones and covered with fleas, walked right up on the deck and sat in its old spot.

"Just like Simba used to," Blaine said.

To summarize the evidence: Young dog vanishes. Thirteen years on, old dog turns up, sits in same spot. Vet says -- eh, can't say it isn't the same dog. What would help us cast the deciding vote here?

... Their daughter, a fourth-grade teacher at Westminster Catawba Christian School in Rock Hill, polled her class. Each kid said it was Simba.

Well, that settles that.

It'd be nice not to push the hed envelope without good reason. It'd be nice if soaring prose had a few more hours of training before it tried to solo. But it'd be even nicer if we saved those conversations for stories that need to run, rather than spending them on stories that ought to be bound up in burlap bags and dropped quietly into the pond.

In case you were wondering, no. I don't think it's a sweet, heartwarming story, and I don't think those alleged virtues, even if present, would make up for holes you could drive a fleet of delivery trucks through. If you want a friend, go hyphenate a sorry-looking excuse for what might once have been a yellow dog.

Trending topic

One of those enduring topics over at certain Fair 'n' Balanced Networks is evil bureaucrats getting in the way of patriotic impulses, particularly veterans who are just trying to fly the flag:

Students Sue Over Removal of American Flag T-shirts (June 23)

Mom: R.I. School Bans 8-Year-Old Son's Patriotic Hat With Army Figures (June 17)

Wisconsin Veteran Must Remove Flag After Memorial Day, Wife Says (May 26)

WWII Vet Ordered to Remove American Flag From Outside New Hampshire Home (May 20)

Decorated Veteran, 90, Fights to Raise Flag in His Yard (Dec. 3)

Pennsylvania Firefighter Suspended for U.S. Flag on Locker (Oct. 17)

Oregon Apartment Complex Bans Flying the American Flag (Oct. 14)

... so you'd like to think that when it's the Marines and the Tea Party-favored "Don't Tread on Me" flag, maybe somebody could be bothered to read the heds before publishing?

Is "don't trend on me" a Cupertino error? Is it a fingerfehler by some new hire who heretofore couldn't imagine a Cooler. Verb. Evar. than "trend"? I don't know, and I don't want to spend too much time picking on one-off typos. But when you're holding the line alone against Those Liberal Media and all their minions and catamites, you should expect a tad bit of public ridicule for being such a public doofus.