Another way to misunderstand headlines
« previous post | next post »
MedPage Today is an excellent source for medical news — but recently their email service has started juxtaposing headline-fragments in a way that takes me aback:
Those e-cigarettes for kids are neither a morning break nor a medicare fraud, despite what I thought at first. And the fix to the Sustainable Growth Rate has no connection with Richard III's genome, whether upside or down:
And porn addiction doesn't actually involve fluoride for babes, mythical or otherwise:
Rod Johnson said,
February 17, 2014 @ 8:29 pm
Gricefail. I guess we shouldn't interpret feeds as if they observed the cooperative principle.
===Dan said,
February 17, 2014 @ 8:41 pm
Fake Bloomberg News Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/BloombrgNewsish
Mark Mandel said,
February 17, 2014 @ 9:13 pm
Anybody point that out to them?
Haamu said,
February 18, 2014 @ 2:45 am
Is the first one always a question, or have they simply decided that "?" makes a good delimiter?
David Morris said,
February 18, 2014 @ 4:50 am
What kind of 'babes' are we talking about here?
Alex said,
February 19, 2014 @ 2:44 am
Maybe it's a problem with the HTML. It's like there's supposed to be a br-tag in between the headlines that isn't being read by email readers. It can be frustrating for whoever's doing those headlines, thinking that there's a proper separation between them.
[(myl) Sorry, no. The Subject line of the email:
Subject: Morning Break: E-Cigs for Kids? A $12 Million Medicare Fraud
The relevant bit of html:
]
maidhc said,
February 19, 2014 @ 5:54 am
E-Cigs for Kids? A $12 Million Medicare Fraud
That there is poetry. Deserves to go on T-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags and other media of expression.
John said,
February 27, 2014 @ 7:05 am
Is the use of "babes" for (presumably) "babies" normal in this context? Seems a bizarrely poetic choice of word, as if they were more worried about counting syllables than characters.