Damn Good

I remember my excitement when I found out, at the age of nine or ten, that my father wrote the headlines in the newspaper. I knew he wrote for the paper, but I thought only the most exalted writers got to write the headlines. And it actually was something of a skill, because you had to generate a headline that fit the width of the story, and that included a verb. I didn’t realize until I edited a newspaper in college that the basic tendency of human beings is to write headlines without verbs. Like BIG RUCKUS AT PARTY. But this doesn’t convey action: what you need is something like PARTYGOERS CAUSE RUCKUS. Of course that kind of headline would be too pickayune for the Chicago Tribune (excuse me -- house style requires capitalizing “the” -- “for The Chicago Tribune”). The Tribune would be more likely to have GERMANY CAUSES RUCKUS.

Anyway, as a public service, I’ll give you the rule for punchy writing, passed on straight from my father and The Chicago Tribune. Here it is: “Every time you use the word very, change it to damn. And then take it out, because you can’t use the word damn in the newspaper.”

This leads me to the apotheosis of good headlines, which is British newspapers. They have headlines that make me weep with their cleverness and aptness. The only American paper that ever gave them a run for their money was the Village Voice Literary Supplement. The VLS was too rarified for these times, and is no more. But I remember with wistfulness their review of a book about medieval nuns who had been burned at the stake. The headline was Hot Cross Nuns.

By contrast, the New York Times reviewed the book under the headline Nuns in Spain.

This epitomizes why I’m not impressed by the New York Times.

Just this summer a British paper -- I think it was the Observer -- had a lovely little headline on people who hire private detectives to keep tabs on their loved ones. The headline was I Spy With My Private Eye. It satisfies me just to think about it.

But that’s nothing compared to the two mightiest headlines I’ve ever seen. The first was in the Guardian, and it was an article about a new housing development. Go ahead and take a moment to think up all the clever headlines about housing developments that come to mind. It’s not a very fertile topic, is it? This housing development was in a part of Manchester called Hulme, which is pronounced “Hume.” (That detail is important.) They’d ripped out the old housing, but they didn’t want to destroy the character of the neighborhood, so the new housing was designed to re-create the old homey feeling. The headline was New Place like Hulme.

I’m practically weeping from the cleverness of it right now.

The final masterful headline of the previous century was from an article about a sad case of suicide. A canon -- a type of clergyman -- had written an anonymous preface to a report about the state of the Church of England. Every one of these reports has a preface, usually bland and dull, but this canon had used the opportunity to write a scathing and quixotic indictment of the Church, modern times, everything he viewed as leftwing, and most parts of Britain. It caused a scandal, and reporters hunted him till they uncovered his identity, whereupon he was hounded mercilessly. Horrified, he killed himself. The Sunday Times did a long and thoughtful article about this tragedy and about the man’s futile attempt to face off against the soft lefties he saw as the enemy. The headline: Canon to the Right of Them.

I think these are very good. By which I mean they’re damn good. But which I mean: they’re good.