Thinking about Headlines

There are different ways to do headlines, adopting by different journalistic organizations.

The front page for the Wall Street Journal had the following headline on p.1, on Nov. 22, "Disney Executives Told Board They Lost Faith in Ousted CEO." Note that every word there is capitalized except for a preposition, "in". Note also, as is common, that the headline is a full grammatical sentence in the present tense.

This is a form of what is known as an "Up style" of headline typography.

A more drastic Up style is one in which EVERY LETTER IS UPPER CASE. This is generally used only for very short and dramatic headlines. ARMSTRONG ON MOON. Headlines suitable for all caps treatment at generally not sentences. They are phrases or sometimes single words.

But there is also a Down style, typified by the usage of The Guardian, a distinguished London publication. A Guardian headline might read, "China fury at broader US inquiry into Covid.' (See col. one, in the image above.) Note the difference. Not only different from the drastic moon-landing all-caps style, but different from the Wall Street Journal style cited above.

Setting aside the initials "US," only two actual words are capitalized. The first word of the first sentence (both the name of a country and the word "Covid," with its totemic significance over recent years. Look at the other examples on the front page displayed above. Normal sentence, in bold face and larger print that the text below them, but not screaming for our attention.

Down styles are emotionally lower-key than up styles. Up styles are supposed to command your attention. Down styles make their own appeal. "We know, dear reader, that you are serious about learning the news and don't need for us to shout at you."

Sort of like Steve Perry versus Sting, to revert to a question from last week! STEVE PERRY versus Sting.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog