Accusatory headline
It's been a very long time since we've written about the way newspapers
report on people suspected of, alleged to have committed, accused of,
or charged with criminal behavior of one kind or another. The
usual situation is that a paper, in an effort to avoid asserting
guilt, ends up writing that "the unidentified suspect fled the scene"
or "so-and-so was charged with allegedly embezzling $10,000" or the
like. But things can go wrong in the other direction as well.
Here's the
Palo Alto Daily News
of 6 January, with this headline on p. 4:
Redwood
shooter
pleads
not guilty
Oh no, this really won't do. Describing Marco Antonio Carlos as a
"shooter" is definitely over the line; it asserts that he shot someone
(a teenager from Newark, CA), but that's exactly the sort of claim of
guilt that newspapers usually want to avoid. The paper could have
referred to "shooting suspect" instead of "redwood shooter", but, I'd
speculate, in the heat of getting the paper out, it missed the
problem. Headline writing is a hell of a job.
Now, a footnote about the multiple ambiguity of "Redwood
shooter". Almost any expression plucked from its context is
multiply ambiguous, but
headlines
(given that they are so compressed) are especially likely to invite
multiple interpretations.
So: a "Redwood shooter" could be a person who shoots (into) redwoods
with some sort of weapon; a person who shoots redwood, or redwoods, out
of some sort of weapon (a cannon, perhaps); a weapon for shooting
redwoods, in either sense of "shoooting redwoods"; or a person who does
shooting in redwood forests. Or, in this case, given that the
headline is in a Palo Alto paper, a shooter from Redwood City CA.
Context is important: this abbreviation might not work elsewhere, even
in the Bay Area, and it certainly wouldn't work outside of it -- in
Atlanta, say.
(Please don't send me other interpretations. There probably are a
zillion of them. I'm still trying to cope with people complaining
that I didn't get
ALL of the possible interpretations
of "We saw her duck" in my last posting on headlines, linked to above.)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 8, 2007 10:43 AM