When three almost identical headlines say different things

[Joe Carillo]

Question sent in by e-mail by Ms. Ivy Mendoza (April 25, 2011):

Hello Mr. Carillo,

Which is correct among the three newspapers below with almost identical heads for their banner stories?

My reply to Ms. Ivy Mendoza:

Let’s take a closer look at those three news headlines in text form:

Manila Bulletin: Hopes dim for miners
Philippine Daily Inquirer: Hope dims for survivors
Philippine Star: Hopes dim for 17 miners

As headlines go, given the grammatical liberties usually taken by headline writers and the tolerance of readers for imprecise English in headlines, I think all three headlines do a fairly good job of capturing the essence of that news story in capsule form.

Grammatically and semantically, however, I think only the Manila Bulletin and Philippine Star versions would pass the litmus test. In these two headlines, “Hopes dim for miners” and “Hopes dim for 17 miners,” the word “dim” has the virtue of being interpreted either as an adjective in the sense of “faint” or as a verb in the sense of “to become faint.” When we think of “dim” as an adjective, the noun “hopes” can be taken as a subject (in the abstract sense of “expectations”) modified by “dim for miners” or “dim for 17 miners” as an adjective phrase. In this sense, the act of “hoping” in that headline can be attributed to everybody who has a stake in the survival of the miners buried by the landslide: the miners themselves and their kin, the mining company, and the public at large. On the other hand, when we think of “dim” as a verb in that headline, the word “hopes” can be taken as a noun that does the intransitive action of “dimming.” In this alternative sense of that headline, the noun “hopes” can likewise be understood as the collective action of everybody who has a stake in the survival of the buried miners.

I would say, though, that the Philippine Star headline is more semantically precise than the Manila Bulletin’s because it qualified the reference of the headline only to the “17 miners” and not to all the miners who figured in that landslide. This semantic qualification is significant in that the  miners who survived that landslide should, strictly speaking, no longer be counted among the objects of the hopes of being rescued.

Now, as to the Philippine Inquirer’s headline, “Hope dims for survivors,” it suffers from a semantic wrinkle because of its use of “dims” as a verb and of “hope” as the doer of the action of that verb. In that headline, the sense is not made clear as to who is doing the “hoping.” The apparent intent of that headline, though, seems to be that the “survivors” are the ones doing the “hoping,” but we can see right away that this is a wrong idea because the known “survivors” of that landslide are alive, already above ground, and no longer needs rescuing.

One cure I can see for this semantic wrinkle is to rewrite that Inquirer headline as follows: “Hope for survivors dims.” In this construction, the noun phrase “hope for survivors” clearly becomes the subject followed by “dim” as an intransitive verb. Here, it’s clear that what has dimmed is the expectation of saving more of the buried miners, and that it isn’t the “survivors” who are doing the “hoping” but everybody who has a stake in the survival of those buried miners.