Language Log

From Alon Lischinsky:

In "Brit noun pile heds quizzed" (3/5/2009), you wondered when did British news media start writing headlines as long, complex noun compounds.

While I have nothing resembling a clear answer, I've just noticed that it must go back to the 1930s at least. In "The Professor's Manuscript", one of the stories published in her 1939 collection In the Teeth of the Evidence, Dorothy Sayers makes what's obviously an allusion to common practice:

Mr. Egg brought his mind back—a little unwillingly— from the headlines in his morning paper ("screen star's marriage romance plane dash"—"continent comb-out for missing financier"—"country-house mystery blaze arson suspicions"—"budget income-tax remission possibility"), and wondered who Professor Pindar might be when he was at home.

Items 1, 3 and 4 in the list are perfect examples of the sort of headline you discussed in that post. If only item 2 had been “missing financier continent comb-out”…

Well, almost: Mark Kinver, "Citizen science charts horse chestnut tree pest spread", BBC News 1/24/2014. Though charts might have been a plural noun, it's clearly a verb in this case, alas. The headline writer missed the chance for a genuine 8-element noun pile, e.g. "Citizen science horse chestnut tree pest spread tally".

Still, British headline interpretation continues to be good practice for reading classical Chinese poetry.

Katia Dmitrieva, "Madonna addicted to sweat dance plugs Toronto condos: Mortgages", Bloomberg News 1/10/2014 — Reader CD, a hardened journalistic veteran, calls this "a rare American noun pile headline":

It’s a spectacular garden path which turns out to be a noun pile. I’m pretty good at parsing headlinese but I had no idea what the story was supposed to be about, or even what the syntax was supposed to be, until I clicked through. I suppose it would have helped if I’d known the name of the song beforehand. I’m quite impressed by the flimsiness of the connection between the lead and the content of the story too, but that’s another matter.  

On the nationality question, it’s a Canadian story and possibly a Canadian writer, but Bloomberg has a very strict style guide for headlines regardless of jurisdiction, so I’m comfortable calling it American.

Joe Manfre writes:

I was looking through a Flickr group celebrating the always sensationalist headlines for the Argus newspaper in Brighton and Hove,  and in it I found a few pretty good noun piles:

FIREWORKS BLAZE BOSS VERDICT
HOVE GARDEN POND CLASH – PICTURE
BLAZE DEATH MURDER QUIZ
DOG KNIFE KILLING VERDICT
BRIGHTON COCKROACH CURRY HOUSE FINE
BRIGHTON PHOTO STUDIO JOBS MISERY

We can add:

SURF GIRLS' BEACH BATTLE
WORTHING RUNAWAY ELECTRIC BUGGY CHAOS

(though "electric" is an adjective, really), and

RUBBISH ROW RESIDENTS IN VILE CARDS SHOCK

(though that is two three-element noun piles connected with a preposition).

…submitted by Jesse Sheidlower: "China Ferrari sex orgy death crash".

Emma Little, "Fish foot spa virus bombshell", The Sun, 10/18/2011.

[h/t John Coleman]

SC, a native reader of British headlinese, was baffled by the noun pile-up "Coin change 'skin problem fear'" on the BBC News web site, because he hadn't previously encountered the story.

Fans of noun piles will enjoy the recent blog post by Mike Pope, a technical editor at Microsoft, "Fun (or not) with noun stacks." Mike shares a few of the lovely compound noun pileups he's encountered on the job:

• data bound control table row action links
• failed password security question answer attempts limit
• reduced minimum OS partition space available requirement

Mike goes on to explain why he thinks these problematic constructions continue to crop up in technical writing, driven by imperatives of terseness and concision at the expense of comprehensibility. He also gives helpful advice for untangling technical noun piles into something more user-friendly. That's all well and good, but you have to wonder just how deeply enmeshed in nerdview a writer must be to produce a whopper like "failed password security question answer attempts limit."

Ian Preston reports this British headline word pile construction noun phrase length gem: "Ben Douglas Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown 'sorry'".

Ian's construal:

I usually have no trouble decoding these but this latest BBC example challenged me: Ben Douglas Bafta race row hairdresser James Brown 'sorry'. That's eight nouns in a row, four of them coming in the names of  two people's I'd not previously heard of.  It's intelligible once you know the story: a hairdresser called James Brown caused a controversy by using racial insults to Ben Douglas at the Bafta awards ceremony and has apologised.    I didn't know the story and, thinking someone called Ben Douglas must have provoked a controversy about race by winning a Bafta, struggled on first reading to incorporate hairdressing or the Godfather of Soul into the train of associations.  I think I'd have read it correctly without the names.

Chris Dammers writes to point out a classic British headline noun pile-up on the BBC's news index page, "Sack rape row Clarke – Miliband":

"Ministers mull volcano ash cloud flight chaos measures", BBC News, 4/18/2010.