I once saw one that said
“Toyota Impacted by Sudden Acceleration”
The story was about the company Toyota being affected by the issue of Sudden Acceleration, not an individual car being struck.
I know it’s easier to use impact than to remember the difference between affect and effect, but this is one case where it would have been worth the effort.
Saw this just last week, and the sentence really took a left turn on me.
Local Food Truck Gets Shot At Reality TV
I’ve searched the net for it but can’t find it. Allegedly the Columbia Journalism Review exposed it.
Picture this: Mexico City. Pope Visits. There’s an earthquake. Headline:
Pope comes, earth shakes
Vladimir Nabokov refers in “Pale Fire” to the poet who had saved a clipping from the sports page, apparently because he was amused by the seeming fact that a line from the Arts and Lit pages somehow got transposed into the sports section:
Yanks top Boston, 4-3
On Chapman’s Homer
I’m sure this was intentional, but I’m posting in anyway. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Outhouses Preserved for Posterity
“Deer Kill 150,000”
Mother Nature is rising up against us!
What are the actual meanings of these headlines?
From the crashblossoms.com site, I like:
**Woman Tied to Gun Used to Kill Colo. Prisons Chief **
Sure, but what is she doing these days?
This hunting season (or authorized cull) has resulted in 150,000 deer being killed.
That is brilliant! I bet someone at the Post came up with that while Ike and Tina were both still alive, and then spent months or years praying every day for Tina’s continued good health.
This might only make sense to British people:
Troops Watch Orange Walk
I remember a book from the 50’s by H. Allen Smith, entitled “To Hell in a Handbasket”. The author told of a beginning girl reporter who wrote a story about a pair of newlyweds going off on their honeymoon. She used their name in the headline, thusly:
COCKBURNS OFF ON WEDDING TRIP.
You sometimes see unfortunate combinations of headlines. Right next to each other on the BBC news site a few months back:
South west expecting more floods
Lloyds Bank prepares for flotation
Or another one from years ago, not on the BBC:
Africa: Glamour. Decadence. Murder.
Hundreds of secretarial opportunities.
Well it would have worked the other way round.
This sequential pair is on CNN right now.
Black market in kidneys thrives here
Most billionaires live here
National Inquirer “World’s weather is out of control!” I wasn’t aware that the worlds weather ever was in control.
Really? I thought Ike was famous for committing domestic abuse against his wife, and not vice-versa. (She retaliated not physically, but by becoming a bona fide solo star).
ETA: Maybe you mean that, had Tina died first, the headline would have suggested not a continuation of violence which really happened, but rather a justified retaliatory attack. Good point!
Just spotted on a sidebar at Slate: Texas Tech Cuts Football Player After Reportedly Punching Girl in Face.
The Record of Bergen County, New Jersey ran a headline on the sentencing of a hospital worker caught “in the act” with a dead body:
SEVEN YEARS FOR NECROPHILIA
The thing that made it morbidly funny (and also reprehensible) was that it ran on September 11, 2008.