Anglopolis: Headlines Wordplay

For thousands of years, humans have known that if you want to catch a fish you need to attract it with the right bait. The online media word ‘clickbait’ was inspired by this ancient trick and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016. Clickbait is something that hooks readers in so that they click on a link; in the context of online news, that clickbait is often a dramatic headline. A good clickbait headline squeezes a lot of information and interest into just a few words so, as a reader, expect to see some weird grammar and even word games in there.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if you don’t always get puns in headlines, but when you do, it is very satisfying. So, let’s have a look at some of the games that headline-writers play.

Double meanings

As any English learner will know, the English language is full of homonyms —words that have the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings. Having a lot of homonyms makes life more complicated for people learning English but more fun for people writing headlines! If a language has a lot of homonyms, there’s plenty of opportunity to make puns. 

Fun with puns

Puns can be cheesy but they’re pretty common in English language journalism and especially in headlines. When Kate Middleton was about to give birth to her first child and heir to the British throne, a headline in the Australian Courier Mail punned “A Breath of Fresh Heir”. This plays with the expression ‘A breath of fresh air’, meaning something new and refreshing. ‘Heir’ and ‘air’ are pronounced exactly the same.

A headline from an article about pork in the British magazine The Economist included two piggy puns: “Soaring pork prices hog headlines and sow discontent in China.” ‘Hog’ is used here as a verb meaning ‘to take over’ the majority of something but ‘hog’ is also a noun meaning ‘pig’. ‘Sow’ is used here as a verb meaning ‘to plant’ or ‘spread’ but a ‘sow’ (same spelling, different pronunciation) is a noun meaning ‘female pig’.

And this final example is a classic from the British tabloid newspaper The Sun, which managed to make a three-way pun from just one word. In 1984, when French sheep farmers attacked lorries carrying British meat into France, The Sun’s front page carried the headline “L’Ambush!” It has ‘lamb’, ‘ambush’ and ‘L’ with an apostrophe, which imitates the French article for ‘the’ before a noun. Brilliant!

Sensationalism at the Sun

The Sun newspaper has always had a reputation for fireworks in its headline writing. In 2006, the paper chose a flippant tone for a serious subject with the headline “How do you solve a problem like Korea?” for a story about how then North Korean president Kim Jong-il had just carried out the country’s first nuclear test. The headline plays with the song from the musical 'The Sound of Music', “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”

Practically perfect 

And while we’re on the theme of musicals starring Julie Andrews... a song from the film Mary Poppins inspired one of the most dazzlingly playful headlines ever. When footballer Ian Callaghan scored three goals against Queens Park Rangers (also known simply as QPR), a creative headline writer at the Liverpool Echo took the song title Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and turned it into “Super Calli scores a hat-trick, QPR atrocious”. The headline was so satisfying that it has been re-used in various versions over the years.  

Chopping words out

The first thing to remember is that headline writers sometimes leave words out, so be aware that articles (e.g. a/an/the), auxiliary verbs (e.g. do/will/would) and the verb ‘to be’ might be missing. For example, “House Delays Vote on Infrastructure Bill” (no articles); “Women told to dial 999” (‘have been’ is missing before ‘told’); and “Chop chop: Britain in urgent need of butchers” (the verb ‘is’ after ‘Britain’ is missing). This last headline is also interesting because it includes an example of word play, something that’s a common feature of headlines in English. ‘Chop chop’ means ‘hurry up’ and ‘chop’ is a verb often used in connection with cutting meat, so it’s appropriate for a story about butchers.