Headlines are wonderful things; subheads, sometimes more so. My favourite crash blossom of all time appeared in Dublin's Evening Herald many, many years ago, but it's one that stayed with me to this day. The story revolved around rabbits' famed proclivity for reproduction, and alluded to a report that suggested that we humans were just as prolific in that department. The headline? Man Beats Rabbits in Sexual Activity. I really, really wish I'd kept a copy of that paper.
These days, though, we still have many to choose from. The tabloids aim to have the best headlines, but given that they try to have a good one every day, they inevitably fail a lot more than they succeed. The Mirror's recent front page is a case in point.
Hahaha... they said 'snow' instead of 'no'. That's brilliant. Except it isn't, and it gives the sentence a meaning that's diametrically opposite that of the intended one. Yeah, I know, no one's going to be confused, but really: is this the best they could come up with? I leave it as an exercise to the reader to come up with a better one, but shitty puns based on 'snow', 'flake', 'drift', etc, abound.
Fortunately, we have the
Register to fill the void. The Reg adopts a certain tabloidy tone, but is
always usually an entertaining and informative read. Their language, though, contains quite a bit of jargon; stuff that'll be familiar to long-time readers, but utterly bemusing for the rest of the populace. The occasional reference to
Bulgarian Airbags, for example, could well have hapless readers runnng in vain to the dictionary, and one must take pity on the poor soul who looks for reviews of the UK's broadband providers only to come across the headline
Three cops spanking in mobile user ranking. Makes perfect sense if you know how to read it.
For sheer class, though, the Reg is unparallelled in the world of the Subhead. I tip my hat to the great mind that came up with
this or
this.
