Today’s Calvin and Hobbes, in which Calvin shows his mastery of tabloid headline writing:
Calvin’s doing well on the headline register (simple present tense for reporting events, omission of articles) used with other stylistic features (lexical choices in ichthyoid, grim melee, devours) and a breathless framing of the report, to reproduce the genre of tabloid headlines.
January 1, 2015 at 11:16 am |
A lot of headline-ese words have disappeared. Decades ago I imagined the ultimate headline-ese headline “Yule Prexy Ouster Slated”. Nowadays editors get bombarded about any substitution of “Christmas”, prexy (president) has disappeared, ouster is rare. Autopsies are still slated, for some reason. (This old pathologist notes that it’s quite handy to have a chalkboard in an autopsy room.)