You really had to go with it? How annoying puns in headlines are
Months ago I noticed something in German online news sites. I usually check SPON a few times a day to check what is going on in the world. Soon I came across some good headlines that used a pun and changed a few words to meet the topic of the article. It was new to me, so I found it a little refreshing. But soon I started noticing more and more. It’s the same phenomenon I call the „smart Syndrom“. You never notice the cars on the street, especially Smarts. But as soon as you think about buying a Smart — boom everywhere ! — there’s not a single street in the world where you don’t see a Smart. And it takes years until this sixth sense disappears. Sorry, I’m getting little off track here. So the Smart Syndrom can be applied to puns in headlines. The more you see them, the more you get annoyed. So I stopped reading SPON and tried something else. But some days went by and I started to see them in other headlines across the Internet. Why do journalists do that? From time to time it’s okay to do that, but not ALL. THE. TIME. To prove my point I checked some sites online during the morning and looked just randomly if I can find instantly such annoying headlines. And there you go:
SPON „Auf die Plätze, reise, los!“
Taz „ Ich glaub, ich Sterb im Wald“
Frankfurter Rundschau „Nintendo will wieder mitspielen“
SPON „Sieg, geil!“
And the last one is really stupid. I don’t need to comment that further. You see, it is a phenomenon that you can find across all news sites. I didn’t even have to look much for it, I found those four examples in like ten minutes.
The recipe seems to be: take a pun, change one word of it and replace it with something that relates to your topic and there you go! I must admit though, that „Nintendo will wieder mitspielen“ is not really a pun. But Nintendo, a company that develops video games, and wanting „ to play along“. There’s something in it.
But if we take a closer look on the websites I found these headlines, we can see that they all have something in common: they all are more or less considered to be leftist newspapers. As a fact, I could not find something comparable at FAZ.net, which is highly considered to be conservative. Coincidence? Don’t know, that it is something I will look out for in the future.
