{"id":21652,"date":"2015-10-14T07:30:05","date_gmt":"2015-10-14T12:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=21652"},"modified":"2018-03-06T20:48:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T01:48:20","slug":"noun-pile-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=21652","title":{"rendered":"Noun pile history"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Alon Lischinsky:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">In \"<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a style=\"color: #000080; text-decoration: underline;\" href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=1206\">Brit noun pile heds quizzed<\/a><\/span>\" (3\/5\/2009), you wondered when did British news media start writing headlines as long, complex noun compounds.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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 <em>In the Teeth of the Evidence<\/em>, Dorothy Sayers makes what's obviously an allusion to common practice:<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Mr. Egg brought his mind back\u2014a little unwillingly\u2014 from the headlines in his morning paper (\"<span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">screen star's marriage romance plane dash<\/span>\"\u2014\"<span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">continent comb-out for missing financier<\/span>\"\u2014\"<span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">country-house mystery blaze arson suspicions<\/span>\"\u2014\"<span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">budget income-tax remission possibility<\/span>\"), and wondered who Professor Pindar might be when he was at home.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">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 \u201c<span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">missing financier continent comb-out<\/span>\u201d\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>And surely more recent practice would have omitted the 's to yield\u00a0\"<span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">screen star marriage romance plane dash<\/span>\".<\/p>\n<p>I haven't been able to locate a historical archive of British tabloids, but there must be one online somewhere, in which we could track this style to its source. Unless it started with Elizabethan handbills, or something?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[277,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlinese","category-language-and-the-media"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21652"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21656,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21652\/revisions\/21656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}