Headlines

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The writing style of headlines is a frequent source of amusement. Language Log has often drawn water from this well. James Joyce famously cast one chapter of his novel Ulysses entirely in newspaper style, with many very comic takeoffs on the way headlines are written. My favorite headline from that chapter was "KMRIA," which was short for, "Kiss my royal Irish arse."

Tonight I had occasion to recall a headline I once read in a tech publication in the late 1980s: "Sun Eyes Apple Gains." (Sun Microsystems was a major computer-market player at that time.)

Imagine if we could send messages back in time, and we sent that headline to someone in 1960, and asked them to guess what it meant.

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