Dumb headlines, vol. CXXXVII

July 18, 2008 @ 12:16 pm · Filed by under The language of science

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After reading about the evolutionary origins of (some brainstem pathways controlling) social vocalization, you might enjoy seeing what you get from people who get paid for explaining things to you, and have actual editors and stuff:

"Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins"; "Honey? Gurgle, gurgle"; "Researchers report toadfish sing to attract mates"; "When fish talk, scientists listen"; "We all sing like fish"; "Spread the word: Fish talk"; "Grunting fish tell of the origins of human speech"; "Grunting, humming fish joins ancient chorus";  "Study dates origin of vocal sounds"; "Cornell scientists discover how fish 'talk'"; "Talking fish"; "Mud-dwelling Toadfish Give Clues to the Origin of Human Speech"; etc.

As you probably know, headlines aren't written by the people who write the stories beneath them. As a result, the silliness of a headline is not a very good predictor of the quality of the story. In a case like this, where the headlines are so bad, the stories are generally much better, though of course some are even worse…

My own favorite headline in this batch is "Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins". But in a less ironic mode, the best headline for this story that I've seen so far — with one of the better stories behind it — is Ker Than, "Humming Fish Reveal Ancient Origins of Vocalization", National Geographic News, 7/17/2008.

My nomination for the most disappointing headline and story: David Malakoff, "From grunting to gabbing", ScienceNOW Daily News, 8/17/2008, which begins:

Next time you tell someone "I love you" or "Hey, that's my parking space," thank a fish. The brain wiring that enables vertebrates like us to vocalize probably first evolved in fish some 400 million years ago, a new study suggests.

The overinterpretation in that lede doesn't get dialed back in the rest of the story, alas.

July 18, 2008 @ 12:16 pm · Filed by under The language of science


16 Comments

  1. JS Bangs said,

    July 18, 2008 @ 12:25 pm

    The headline "Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins" is so obscure that I don't think I'd even be able to parse it if I didn't already know what the article was about.

  2. Bobbie said,

    July 18, 2008 @ 2:51 pm

    I had to look up "boffins" to find out that they are scientific types, rather similar to "absent-minded professors." The term is British and Australian, according to the article I found. Way too obscure for me, thanks.

  3. Benjamin Zimmer said,

    July 18, 2008 @ 2:53 pm

    Boffins are awfully busy in The Sun's headlines.

  4. Mark Liberman said,

    July 18, 2008 @ 3:02 pm

    JS Bangs: The headline "Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins" is so obscure that I don't think I'd even be able to parse it if I didn't already know what the article was about.

    Try thinking of it in the aesthetic tradition of Tang Dynasty poetry:

    Toadfish sex hum stirs boffins,
    The stone gate breaks asunder
    Venting in the pit of heaven,
    An impenetrable shadow.

  5. Z said,

    July 18, 2008 @ 3:31 pm

    > Try thinking of it in the aesthetic tradition of Tang Dynasty poetry.

    Wow, I had no idea that someone had formed a dynasty out of a powdered orange drink! How did that work out? Was their official motto "just add water"?

    [Details are here or via Google search.]

  6. Xenobiologista said,

    July 18, 2008 @ 10:36 pm

    First one: awful. Second: totally uninformative. The one that starts "Grunting fish…" strikes the best balance between short, catchy, and descriptive.

  7. Ray Girvan said,

    July 19, 2008 @ 6:07 am

    "boffins" to find out that they are scientific types, rather similar to "absent-minded professors."

    Yep. Its original sense (WW2 origin) was quite positive – scientists who were admired within the military for inventing stuff and, often, putting their lives on the line by going along on missions to test it in the field. Post-war it became distinctly pejorative term implying eccentrics into not-very-useful science (think of Professor Branstawm).

  8. Ray Girvan said,

    July 19, 2008 @ 6:11 am

    Tang Dynasty poetry

    Very nice.

    And the toadfish calling clearly over ripples of green water

  9. Paul Carter said,

    July 19, 2008 @ 7:51 am

    Occasional linguistically-interesting headlines is about the only positive thing I can think to say about The Sun (the source of the stirred boffins headline) as a so-called "news"paper: for those of you who aren't British, see its Wikipedia page for a taste of its stories. Expecting reasoned science stories from The Sun is a bit like expecting Chomsky to wholeheartedly back the US Republican party and tell us all how behaviourism was right all along.

    One interesting semantic note: perhaps The Sun's most hurtful as well as untruthful story (and the one which, unusually, has ever since caused it to lose circulation) was headlined "The Truth". Words mean whatever the editor of The Sun wants them to mean.

    Sun journalists don't "get paid to explain things to you", by the way. It's the sort of rag which cares only about two things: increasing circulation figures and being a political mouthpiece for its proprietor. You won't like me saying it, but The Sun makes many of us Brits say "thank God for the BBC".

  10. Mark Liberman said,

    July 19, 2008 @ 10:04 am

    Continuing the toadfish-in-poetry thread, I've checked the LION database, and apparently neither "toadfish" nor "toad fish" have ever been used in any published English-language poetry or drama. With the discovery of the toadfishes' deep evolutionary connection to all vertebrate vocalization, not to speak of the evocative type I/II distinction, surely this is a gap crying out to be filled.

    A LION search does turn up one literary use in prose — from Thomas Nash, The Vnfortvunate Traveller (1594), in a context that's worth quoting at length, if only as an introduction to late-16th-century English anti-semitism:

    Heere was a wily wench had her liripoop without book, she was not to seeke in her knackes and shifts: such are all women, not one of them but hath a cloak for the raine, and can bleare her husbands eyes as she list. Not too much of this madam Marques at once: wele step a little backe, and dilate what Zadoch the Iew did with my curtizan, after he had sold me to Zacharie . Of an ill tree I hope you are not so ill sighted in grassing to expect good frute: he was a Iew, & intreated her like a Iew. Under shadow of enforcing her to tell how much money she had of his prentice so to bee trayned to his cellar, hee stript her, and scourgd her from top to toe tantara. Day by day hee disgested his meate with leading her the measures. A diamond Delphinicall drye leachour it was.

    The ballet of the whipper of late dayes here in England, was but a scoffe in comparison of him. All the colliers of Romford, who hold their corporation by yarking the blind beare at Paris garden, were but bunglers to him, he had the right agility of the lash there were none of them could make the cord come aloft with a twange halfe like him. Marke the ending, marke the ending. The tribe of Iuda is adiudged from Rome to bee trudging, they may no longer be lodged there, all the Albumazers, Rabisacks, Gedeons, Tebiths, Benhadads, Benrodans Zedechiahs, Halies of them were vanquetouts and turnd out of house and home. Zacharie came running to Zadochs in sack cloth and ashes presently after his goods were confiscated and and tolde him how he was serued, and what decree was comming out against them all. Descriptions stand by, heere is to be expressed the furie of Lucifer when he was turnd ouer heauen barre for a wrangler. There is a toad fish, which taken out of the water swels more than one would thinke his skin could holde, and bursts in his face that toucheth him. So swelled Zadoch , and was readie to burst out of his skinne, and shoote his bowels like chaine-shot full at Zacharies face for bringing him such balefull tidings, his eies glared and burnt bliewe like brimstone and aqua vitæ set on fire in an egshell, his verie nose lightned glow-wormes, his teeth crasht and grated together, like the ioynts of a high building cracking and rocking like a cradle, when as a tempest takes her full but against his broad side.

    The subsequent action, which you can read if you like in the Project Gutenberg version, is irrelevant to toadfish but much more offensive, in the turbid and sadistic style that seems to have been Nashe's norm.

  11. Rob Gunningham said,

    July 19, 2008 @ 11:00 am

    The toadfish, having also played a key role in diabetes research is now the key to another mystery namely did Thomas Nashe ever go to Venice? From Wikipedia:

    An Almond for a Parrot (1590), ostensibly credited to one "Cutbert Curry-knave," is now universally recognized as Nashe's work, although its author humorously claims, in its dedication to the comedian William Kempe, to have met Harlequin in Bergamo while returning from a trip to Venice in the summer of 1589. However, there is no evidence Nashe had either time or means to go abroad, and he never subsequently refers to having visited Venice elsewhere in his work.

    However, as we know, toadfish tail (coda di rospo to linguists) is a Venetian speciality that Nashe may well have eaten; 'time or means' have never been a barrier to trips to Venice, and it is unlikely that Nashe would have mentioned toadfish in The Vnfortunate Traveller had he not been there.

  12. Peter Smith said,

    July 20, 2008 @ 6:12 am

    Now what is Tang poetry without some spurious Tang poetaster to back it up? With a generous distribution of nods to 白居易, 沈括 and of course Mark Lieberman…
    蟾魚配語激學師
    石門破開全碎之
    天上坑中吼吠嚎
    無法穿透隱夢池

  13. Jeremy said,

    July 21, 2008 @ 5:08 am

    I believe Rob Gunningham (and everyone else) may be mistaken. Coda di rospo is not toadfish, but anglerfish. That's the problem with common names.

    Coda di rospo may translate as toad's tail, and the fish is sometimes known as rana pescatrice (fishing frog) but the fish we eat is a member of the genus Lophius.

    Frankly, I don't care whether they can talk. They're delicious.

  14. Stephen Jones said,

    July 21, 2008 @ 7:01 am

    The term is British and Australian, according to the article I found. Way too obscure for me, thanks.

    Yea, next we'll have the Brits claiming they invented English when everybody knows it was made in Texas.

    I wouldn't say there is anything particularly unfavorable about the term 'boffin'.

  15. Ray Girvan said,

    July 21, 2008 @ 8:37 am

    I wouldn't say there is anything particularly unfavorable about the term 'boffin'

    Dunno: it may be one of those terms where the semantics is affected by region/age. To me (UK, 52) it's definitely pejorative, a very specific image of a scientist as someone male, white coat, glasses, bald on top maybe with remaining hair weirdly fluffed out, eccentric with no social skills, and so on – see In defence of the boffin.

  16. John Cowan said,

    July 21, 2008 @ 4:25 pm

    The late (alas) Arthur C. Clarke said in his non-sf novel Glide Path that boffin was an arbitrary alteration of puffin, with reference to the alleged ability of the puffin's eggs to return to the nest when slightly displaced (they are not remotely spherical), which he calls "entirely typical of the ideas put forward by boffins." This etymology and related ones were apparently in the air at the time: the OED maintains a reserved (indeed, sniffy) silence.

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