Something like “Foreign ministers of Italy, France set to meet blablabla”. There’s just two parties being mentioned and yet no “and”. Makes me do a double take every time.
Asking because that’s not a thing in German and I’ve only started noticing it recently but since then I’ve seen it a lot.
It’s a thing that comes from the era of printed newspapers. Every word took up valuable space and cost a lot of ink when printed on millions of papers.
If you could cut a word from a headline and still make perfect sense to readers, you did it. There were no sentences which readers couldn’t understand if you replaced all the ands with commas, so it became the standard for newspaper headlines to do so.
That’s interesting. Especially because like I said it’s not a thing in German. They used to use just an ampersand to be space efficient. I like those unique sorts of quirks. Reminds me of the “etaoin shrdlu” thing. Also no German equivalent.
We know it primarily from context switching. It’s a thing very specific to headline-speak
Ironically when looking up “context switching” I got programming results. Apparently Wikipedia refers to the language thing as “code switching”.
Fewer letters made room to use a larger type-size and still fit on one line. I don’t know, but maybe the comma only needed a half space, & the ampersand needed a whole? They are cuter though.
I’m sure some meticulous German has calculated which letters are use most frequently, I wonder what “name” it would spell?
#Man Attacks Hampster!
Don’t know, I’m just here to state my absolute hate for the practice. Sure you don’t write “A and B and C and D”, but “A, B, C, and D”.
However, “A, B” is absolutely awful.Upvoted purely for the use of the Oxford comma.
It tends to remove ambiguity
And panties.
I feel the pause of the Oxford comma when I speak. Always throws off the rhythm of a sentence when I don’t see it in text.
Another thing that used to interrupt my reading flow. I’ve since come around though.
As a non-native english speaker this headline format bothers me to no end. I guess the intention is to make it shorter but I simply just find it confusing.
I’m more used to it now but it still interrupts my reading flow because I anticipate that a third party will be mentioned and yet the enumeration stops after two.
It’s a very American style thing. UK English media don’t do this, and it always feels strange when I see it in US media
Weirdly, as a non-native speaker I find UK headlines even harder to read.
Eats Shoots and Leaves
You made me realize this is actually pretty common in math, e.g. “Let x, y be real numbers” instead of “Let x and y be real numbers”. I imagine this comes from the infuence of notation like “Let x, y ∈ ℝ”.
My whole life, yeah.
