Feedback e-mailed by DikPascual (July 18, 2011):Hi All,
Talking of misplaced modifiers, the adjective “naked” was used in the head of a news item in the electronic edition of a popular broadsheet. It said someone was facing charges for uploading “naked pictures” of his ex-girl friend. I wonder how a naked picture looks like.
I noticed also that some technicians composing the webpages of electronic newspapers do not have editorial sense and do not know how to write heads that fit and whose first deck does not dangle.
DikPascual
My reply to DikPascual:
I wouldn’t be caught using the term “naked pictures” myself to denote women or men photographed or painted naked or in the nude—certainly not in my conversations or in my writing. As you correctly point out in this particular case, Dik, the term misplaces the modifier “naked,” for it’s not the pictures that are naked but the man's ex-girlfriend shown in them. The correct term is, of course, “pictures of his nude ex-girlfriend," but it’s all of five words and admittedly far less attention-grabbing. So it’s not surprising that more snappy terms like “naked pictures” and “nude photos” come to mind much more easily and get used more frequently. In fact, that popular broadsheet’s online edition is hardly alone in using the term “naked pictures.” I just checked the term “naked pictures” on Google and found almost 10,000,000 results; “nude photos” had almost 22,000,000 results or more than double. So, even if the terms “naked pictures” and “naked photos” are grammatically wrong and editorially iffy, I guess their astounding levels of usage qualify both as at least colloquial for now, and possibly as legitimate idioms like “naked gun,” “naked truth,” and “naked lunch” in the near future.
As to the unsightly and ill-fitting headlines in some online newspapers, I totally agree with you that they lack the editorial finesse and sense of craft found in the more respectable print newspapers. I think this is because the old-school style of headline writing—a prized skill during the heyday of print journalism—is now dying or comatose. It degenerated into that state with the advent of offset printing and now digital publishing. Today, given the digital capability to instantly shrink or expand headline text, editors and headline writers no longer find need for the very exacting discipline of the letter-count and point-count for headlines. (I remember those days when being able to write what you describe as “heads that fit and whose first deck does not dangle” was a bragging right among newspaper editors and writers. Those days, alas, are no more!)
And there’s another factor these days that militates against a web publisher’s being able to come up with well-crafted and balanced news headlines on websites: the compatibility aspect among the major web browsers. An editor or headline writer who comes up with superbly balanced stacks of headlines using, say, Google Chrome often discovers to his or her dismay that some or all of those headlines dangle, become ill-fitting, or even break into the next line when displayed on other web browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox and their various earlier editions that are still in use. Indeed, this situation demands a new technical specialty in web journalism: the expertise to do web layouts and headlines that are compatible with—and display perfectly in—most of the leading web browsers and their various earlier editions. I would say that this expertise will require not only highly capable and experienced writer-editors who are also highly computer literate and web literate—an entirely new editorial breed that may take a few more years to develop in the Philippines.
