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eh no, jheem, I'm glad you brought it up. The thread has been interesting and educational.
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Some confusuion in headlines ("heds" in the news jargon) is that Editors know that short verbs are implied (is, be, was, etc.)
So to an Editor the hed reads Starr is Asked to Delay Report. The problem arises when you're too literal when reading heds.
All very confusing, n'est ce pas?
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Carpal Tunnel
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I think the main problem here is that we don't use the past tense in headlines, unless it's specifically required.
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Starr is Asked to Delay Report
And I believe that most newspaper readers are aware, at least unconciously, of this convention and, as the lovely AnnaS noted, the non-use of the past tense, which means that what appears to be past tense is normally the passive. Unfortunately, following these conventions leads to the misinterpretation of the headline, since the article stated that Starr was doing the asking. The headline should have read:
Starr Asks to Delay Report
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enthusiast
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I just got back after a couple days away. Thanks for the bouncing answers, and even greater thanks for the discussion that followed. Fascinating!
Not to belabour the matter, but back to those famous rubber baby buggy bumpers for just a sec. I know the babies aren't rubber. Not sure if this got pointed out, but it's possible that either the bumpers alone are made of rubber, or the entire buggies are. I think that is the ambiguity (even with a basic understanding of babies, buggies and bumpers) that is hard to correct with hyphens.
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Carpal Tunnel
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it's possible that either the bumpers alone are made of rubber, or the entire buggies are.
Good point. In that light we note that rubber baby-buggy bumpers is ambiguous unless you assume that, if it were only the bumpers that were rubber, then double hyphenization would be required, giving us rubber baby-buggy-bumpers.
Personally, I think that hyphenization is the signpost to the slippery-slope of compound word making, as in the 20th century slide from base ball through the unstable transitional form base-ball to baseball.
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Starr Asks To Delay Report
Starr Asked To Delay Report
Surely the first one implies that it is still possible that Starr's request will be granted, while the second one implies that it is no longer possible (perhaps because the report has already been published).
Bingley
Bingley
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the second one implies that it is no longer possible
I don't see the implications you suggest, simply because the syntax of headlines doesn't indicate that Starr was doing the asking in the latter form. Maybe that's strictly an USn convention, but.
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Although probably not misleading for the target audience:
Intel Misses 1Q Earnings Forecast By A Penny
Anyone care to speculate on how big that penny was?
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that looks like a U.S. American type penny; i.e., one tenth of a dime..
as these things go, this probly caused the value of Intel stock to fall millions of dollar-bucks that day in the resulting sell-off.
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