I’m going to try my best to explain what I’m talking about. Over the years I’ve come across old news headlines, old like from the 40s and earlier, that start off with a verb instead of the noun that is doing the verb. Examples (that I’m making up because I don’t have any real examples because I don’t know what the phenomenon is actually called:)
“BOMB GERMAN RAILROADS”
(Meaning, “American military has bombed German railroads”)
“DIG MILE-LONG IRRIGATION CANAL”
(Meaning, “someone is currently digging a mile-long irrigation canal”)
“STABS INNOCENT VICTIM”
(Meaning, someone has stabbed an innocent victim)
I swear to God I have seen this weird format of headlines many many times, but of course I can’t provide an actual example. What is it called? Why did they do it?
They did it because the active voice is shorter, punchier, and more attention getting than the passive voice like “American military has bombed German railroads” or “German railroads were bombed” or even “German railroads bombed”.
Every fraction of an inch of space in a headline was important back when newspapers were the primary news media. Saving a character or two meant a larger type size could be use and would stand out more on pages that were physically bigger than today’s papers and crowded with numerous articles on a page.
We think of clickbait as somthing new, but it’s merely the modern evolution of attention-getters; the concept has been around since the 19th century.
There are more than a few style books out there (e.g. Chicago Style Book). AP was meant for newspapers and wanted to be efficient with the amount of letters used. Setting up printing blocks was a chore. Column inches mattered.
Chicago style is more for novels. And there are other style books too (I think the NY Times has a style book).
There is no real right or wrong. Just what is best for the task at hand.
I found one on the January 1, 1943 WAR EXTRA edition of the Oakland Post Enquirer. An eight column headline that read “BLAST JAPS ON WAKE”.
I had to do some hunting before I found that one. (I looked at WWII-era papers since that seemed a likely place to start.) I doubt that the practice was widespread. None of the other headlines from that particular paper start with a verb, either. Even that Oakland paper never seemed to do it again on previous or subsequent front pages, though I only brought up a few weeks worth.
@Elmer_J.Fudd, an excerpt from the text is highly unlikely. Again, I’ve never heard of that technique being used anywhere except in a rare direct quote that would be inside quote marks.
Newspaper headlines are an art. It’s virtually impossible to fit the traditional “who, what, where, when, why, how” into the 2-8 short words of a headline.
My journalism instructors would have knocked points off my grade for not clarifying who bombed the German railroads, probably suggesting something like YANKS BOMB RAILS, leaving the issue of whose rails to the body of the story. That said, it was World War II and the typical newspaper reader would (correctly) assume the newspaper was talking about Americans instead of the Royal Air Force.
Here’s one of the best known headlines in the newspaper industry, and it doesn’t even have a verb in it.
I never heard an actual name for the style, but Wiki calls it Telegram Style or “telegraphese” from the days when telegrams charged by the word (overseas cablegrams charged by the character!) and senders were constantly trying to get the message across in as few words as possible.
Here’s a telegram from the poet Ezra Pound to Jacqueline Kennedy after JFK’s assassination. It almost reads like a haiku.
There’s an anecdote about Victor Hugo, who supposedly sent a telegram to his publisher shortly after the publication of his latest novel, Les Misérables. Hugo wanted to know if it was selling well and sent a telegram that simply read “?”. The publisher responded with a plain “!”
I can’t resist the temptation to share a silly old joke on that matter. A dog walks into a telegraph office and hands the clerk a form for a telegram that reads “Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof”.
The clerk says: “That’s nine ‘woofs’, but we have a fixed charge for the first ten words. You can send another ‘woof’ for free.”
The dog replies: “But that would not make any sense at all.”
Probably neither, says the Quote Investigator, who I consider to be the ultimate authority. There were earlier jokes along the same lines, the kind of brief filler items newspapers and magazines have always thrived on. No mention of Victor Hugo appears for 30 years after the supposed telegram and Oscar Wilde doesn’t appear until the 21st century.
Today, I happened to be looking at a copy of the St John’s (Nfld) Evening Telegram from February 1949, and saw two of the types of headline mentioned by the OP:
ANTICIPATES EARLY CONCLUSION OF NORTH ATLANTIC AGREEMENT
(referring to negotiations to establish NATO)
and
Answers Vital Questions on Nfld. Business After Union
(public question and answer session to talk about the effects of Nfld joining Confederation)
In both cases, I had to read the article to find out the subject of the headline.
