Learn English – Struggling to understand headlines that use ellipsis

headline-englishmeaningwriting-style

I have trouble understanding headlines because they abuse ellipsis. Two examples:

  1. "Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan To Awkwardly Hug, High Five For Next Three Months"
  2. "Scores Dead as Fire Sweeps Through Nightclub in Brazil"

In both cases, I don't understand what is happening. What are Romney and Ryan doing for the next three months? What does high five have to do with it? Are they going to hug each other? Did they hug already? I thought The Onion, being a satirical newspaper, was trying to make the most unreadable headline possible to mock the way other papers usually write. But then I came across the example from NY Times and noticed journalists really write that way. Who or what is scoring dead? What does is it mean to "score dead"? I get the feeling the phrase is wrong and that it should be something like "Fire scores dead as it sweeps through nightclub".

I try to read newspapers everyday and I've even checked the answers for a similar question before asking, but I still can't get used to the style of headlines.

So, what do those two headlines mean? And what can I do to improve my reading ability in this specific area?

Best Answer

  1. "Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan to Awkwardly Hug, High Five" was The Onion’s snarky way of insinuating that when Romney selected Ryan as his running mate he condemned both of them— stuffy, constrained, powerful middle-aged white men who are not even ideologically compatible —to three months of pretending close friendship and demonstrating their credentials as "ordinary guys" by practising the conventional gestures of male intimacy, with which they will not be comfortable.

  2. Scores here is not a verb but a plural noun which in the singular means the quantity 20. The number of dead is not certain at the time of writing; it is apparently not so many that it could be appropriately approximated by "Hundreds", but is more than would be implied by "dozens", so the Times selects the intermediate value "scores".

How do you learn to read headlines better? Basically, you have to know the language and the culture they're referring to better—which isn’t very helpful. Happily, it’s not really important to be a fluent reader of headlines.

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