Why so hostile, Ellis? I am completely mystified by your attitude. My comment above had nothing to do with New York City, yet you seem to be taking it personally or something.
This thread is NOT about New York City or what goes on there or what New Yorkers think. This is a general thread on the art of headline writing.
From that blog, an example of a clever headline that I like:
And if you’re “in the industry,” you probably don’t live in Hollywood. You probably live in The Valley.
Well, yeah, that was my point. There’s no subject, but the verb save becomes a gerund.
This is a nitpick, right? It is standard American journalistic convention to refer to the movie and television industry as “Hollywood” regardless of the actual municipal boundaries within which their activities take place.
For example, the Associated Press Stylebook says –
In other words, “Hollywood” more commonly means “the movie industry in southern California” than “the neighborhood of Los Angeles centering on Hollywood Boulevard and Interstate 101.”
Sometimes they come out just plain wrong. In the Det. Free press a couple years ago there was an article about a new school principal in a Det. school. His mission was to clean up and paint up the old schooll to make it more inviting.
He was a black and they showed his picture.
The headline said School Has a New Shine. Just not right.
I am not sure if that’s tongue in cheek or not but if it isn’t I assume you have not met that many New Yorkers. Hell, I’ve never been east of the rockies and I know better.
Not to nitpick too interminably, but the Hell it’s a gerund; it’s an imperative mode verb which does not require a subject and in fact refuses to take one.
Let not your heart be troubled. Cast your grammatical errors on the waters. Take no thought for nitpickers. Go thou, and do likewise.
No, not really tongue-in-cheek. I do know many New Yorkers (including having worked with two who now report for the New York Post) and have been there several times, and most don’t conform to the New-York-is-the-center-of-the-universe stereotype. That’s why I’m a little mystified–it’s as if I’ve wounded Ellis’s civic pride or something, when I’m not even talking about his city, in fact, taking great pains in my posts to clearly indicate I’m not telling New Yorkers how to run their papers, yet my posts are misrepresented and somehow I’m being accused of trying to stamp our “marginal quirks.” Talk about a straw man and a little bit of a martyr complex.
Well, as Polcarp said, that doesn’t quite work. Other than the fact that gerunds in English all end in “-ing,” you’d have to show how the verb “save” functions as a noun in that sentence. It doesn’t. It’s a verb instructing the reader to save. The implied subject is “you,” which is the standard construction for imperatives in English.
pulykamell,
Sorry for my snippiness. That was uncalled for. Maybe you’re right, I’m unnecessarily defensive about this. I know the topic is not all about New York City, but it sort of shaped up like that because all of the current cites were from NYC papers… leading to what I perceived as a “let’s all please stop this awful practice from spreading outside NYC” kind of stance. I guess it’s as if, say, you speak with a southern accent, move elsewhere and then have locals try to “correct” your speech.
I value your contributions to this thread and I don’t want to halt the free inquiry going on.
I should mention that I’m not even originally from New York, so the stereotyping is pointless (don’t mean you, pulykamell).
My concern here is the question of who sets the standards for whom. I don’t think Oregonians should care about “how New Yorkers do it” any more than vice versa (btw, I realize now that the link to the Oregonian was thrown out only as a point of discussion). I believe matters of style can be decided on more of a localized, case-by-case basis and don’t need to be prescribed universally. If it’s a Latin American publication for an international readership should a one-size-fits-all kind of English be used, or should we allow the editor to go his own way with a format that just happens to relate to the standard Latin American format? I don’t know. I don’t take a position on the OP’s problem. I merely wanted to stress that the format the editor is using is not flat-out wrong and is in fact a viable choice.
If by “viable” you mean, “confusing to most English speakers” then yes, it’s viable.
Getting back to the OP:
…the answer is no, it’s not commonly used in US tabloid headlines.
It is commonly used in the headlines of the number one and the number two most widely read tabloid newspapers in the US, the New York Post and the New York Daily News.
If by “commonly” you mean “rarely”, then yes, it is “commonly” used by them.
Wow. Who woulda thought a simple headline GQ would span 2 pages and 96 passionately argued posts? Only at the Dope. 
^^^Yipes, that post was me.
By some odd coincidence, the thread directly below this one when I read it has more information about the event this newspaper refers to. Blowing up an airplane just to kill on passenger? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
Yes, yes, yes, of course I know that “Hollywood” is a metonym. :rolleyes: (In fact, I think I once started a thread here about places becoming metonyms.) But it’s also a place.
Let’s review:
Note the word “live.” Note the preposition “in.” Note the adverb “actually.” Clearly I was not talking about the metonym “Hollywood.” I was talking about the place.
4. You entered the discussion and responded to me by making the same erroneous assumption that Ellis Aponte Jr. had made, saying:
Maybe you didn’t get the joke.
6. And now, after I’ve asserted twice that I’m not talking about the metonym “Hollywood,” but the actual place, you ask if I’m “nitpicking”? :dubious:
I guess subtlety is a dying species.
So I’ll say it in simple terms: Few people who work “in the industry” actually LIVE in the PLACE, the LOCATION, the GEOGRAPHICAL ENTITY known as “Hollywood,” a district of the City of Los Angeles (which is in Southern California), roughly considered to the area bounded by Fairfax on the west, Vermont on the East, Melrose on the south, and the hills on the north, and which excludes, by conventional usage, of course, the city of West Hollywood, a separately incorporated municipality.
And don’t even try to bring up North Hollywood.
Is that clear enough?
And when I say “few,” I mean too few for someone to reasonably assume that any given person who lives in Hollywood must read Variety (or works in “the industry”).
Sorry for the highjack, but it’s intended to keep this thread from going even further all over the place.
Let me get this straight: “Saving Private Ryan,” for example, is not the use of a gerund? It’s imperative? Who taught you grammar?