Friday, November 17, 2006

Headline angst

At the risk of showing the audience the wires above our little enterprise, I'll say that it is sometimes a challenge to come up with headlines for these posts. It is not as difficult as coming up with "heds," as we call them, for a newspaper or tight magazine column, because there space considerations make things much more difficult than readers tend to realize. Think about it. With a column of a fixed width, you can't use two long words in a row, or else you'll be stuck with two lines with one not-long-enough word per line. This explains why heds often use the vague -- and short-- word "ties," as in "Smith Said to Have Qaeda Ties." (Qaeda for Al Qaeda is another little trick.) You couldn't say Terrorist Sympathies, and even Harboring Terrorists probably would spell trouble.

Over at The Valve, a sophisticated collaborative blog devoted to all things literary and academic, to cover most of it, they're having a little contest: what are the worst and best headlines yet for a post on The Valve? "Yes but it is it Arrt" gets a mention for best, though I'm not sure why. A good candidate for worst: "Troping Prog As Toes" [ed:???].

It's worth noting that The Valve itself has a pretty inspired, if enigmatic tagline under its title: "'the safety valve alone knows the worst truth about the engine.' -- William Empson" That's almost as good as the one John mentioned for the influential political blog Balkinization: "an unanticipated consequence of Jack M. Balkin."

Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:14 PM

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