Thursday, February 22, 2007

Beggar Me

The sexlife of head lines

An interesting trend, which warrants further development, may I suggest?

At least these terms still function, roughly, as qualifiers.

I am interested in how such headlines (or utterances in the case of broadcast) get derived from the words issued from a politician's mouth, ranging from almost estate-agent levels of stretch to out and out porkies.

So when something 'will get looked at', this is, at best, from a very long way away and for a very long time, so as to vanish, if possible. Which really means 'will be ignored'.

And when a Minister says on BBC Newsnight 'I didn't say that', and a challenger says 'it's on record that you did', the public remains none the wiser.

I don't know what that has done to my belief in holders of high office, and indeed my faith in the abilities of those in the major media tasked to keep them vaguely on the straight and narrow, but for now I'll have say 'beggared' isn't too bad.

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