headlines – Page 5 – don't confuse the narrator

from this week’s news

A couple of things that have caught my eye on the BBC website this week.

First, from the ‘most popular’ links, comes this:

Sadly, it doesn’t mean that having children can drive you to drink, which is what I imagined. It actually linked through to a story with the headline “Parenting style strongly affects drinking, Demos says”.

The second is from a story about UK social surveys and comes under the headline Why state surveys asked about bras and haddock.
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scheduled water fights

Guardian headline:man charged over water fight

The Guardian have published a story about a guy being charged for arranging a ‘water fight’ using BlackBerry Messenger.

The chaps in in the picture illustrating the article are shown wielding what look like fairly hi-tech water pistols.

Certainly the ‘weapons’ look more efficient than those that I own, which, although pleasingly cheap and cheerful, are unfortunately made up of far too many sections and so tend to leak rather badly.
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it’s not unusual

I suppose it’s difficult for journalists to maintain the momentum of a story that continues for months without very much actually happening. Which presumably accounts for the Evening Standard story headlined:

Assange ‘acts like a moody teenager and is hunted by women’

I thought teenagers were mostly moody due to a lack of attention from the opposite sex, but I guess it’s been a long time since my adolescence.
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the value of good writing

There’s a story up on the BBC website at the moment that quotes Charles Duncombe, “an online entrepreneur”, as saying that a single spelling mistake on a website can cut online sales in half. (For Spanish readers of the blog, there’s a Spanish version of the article available on “BBC Mundo”.)

Duncombe is apparently “shocked” at the poor quality of written English of staff recruited by his companies.

Spelling is important to the credibility of a website, he says. When there are underlying concerns about fraud and safety, then getting the basics right is essential.

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surely some mistake?

A news story on the BBC website under the headline “Polar bears have maternal Irish brown bear ancestors” seems to imply some strange evolutionary time shifts: