the art of news headlines

After moving here, I've gotten into the habit of reading the news on the BBC website nearly every day. I'd never had a routine of this sort in the past; we didn't watch TV, listen to the radio, or subscribe to a major newspaper. But then soon after we moved, we found out that our TV subscription included BBC World, and after once or twice turning on the news to see what was happening and realizing that, you know, the answer was "quite a bit", I then started turning towards the BBC website more and more often.

Since then, I've come to really appreciate the fine art of writing newspaper headlines. I don't tend to read everything, but I'd say that a good fifth to a quarter of the times that I click on a link, it's because I simply can't figure out from the headline what the article is about, and the headline has sufficiently many interesting words to pique my curiosity. Today I found a particularly good one: Station studies face hibernation. It took skimming the first paragraph and reading the headline two or three times for me to realize that the verb was face, not studies. And here I really wanted to know what "face hibernation" was! I've had my feet fall asleep, and I've occassionally had my arms and knees fall asleep (it is impossible to walk if your knee has fallen asleep - once you start bending, you won't stop until you've collapsed on the floor, as I found one day after having fallen asleep seated at a table in the Union. I got up to leave, and tumbled to the floor in a heap at my first step. Felt pretty stupid.), and on very rare occassions I've had the bizarre feeling of my scalp falling asleep. But my face? And it could even hibernate? Curious!

But no, the article was just about a research on a space station being cut back. Interesting, but not nearly as much as I thought it could be.