With the headlines tag in the sidebar already so voluminous, here’s a handy roundup of some of my favourite posts there. After we’ve digested Kate Fox’s insights on headline punning, I propose
- Historical headlines such as “British push bottles up Germans”
- Elderly Horologist Savaged by Heat-Crazed Vole (Private eye), perhaps my all-time favourite
- The classic “Nut screws washers and bolts”
- Ambiguity (some choice instances, including “Free Come On England Hat Inside”)
- King Kong Ping-Pong Sing-Song Ding-Dong
- News desk
- A sporting headline (“Keane displays tenuous grasp of anatomy”—from the Guardian, which offers a retrospective of its own fine contributions to the genre here).
From the Mystic East:
- A wonderful proof-reading slip-up in the China daily
- and my own definitive transliteration in Chinese, a headline involving Švejk, Saint-Saëns, and a toothbrush.
Others from my own “pen”:
Irreverently,
- Jesus jokes, and
- Nicolas Robertson’s excellent sequel Jesus of Benfica.
There are also hours of harmless fun in the “crash blossoms” archive of languagelog.
And I can now offer a recent headline from the Istanbul Bugle, of which I am proprietor and sole contributor—describing the confusion of the Orthodox priest responsible for throwing the Epiphany cross into the Bosphorus, yet unable to locate the incense for the thurifer:
Stephen Jones: a blog 