Headline says to be incoherent
Part of journalistic writing involves a use of the word to that means roughly ‘will.’ For instance, a recent Chicago Tribune headline reads Major urban areas to get Homeland Security grants, and the Guardian reports that Oxford colleges to keep control of admissions. This is possibly an extension of the “scheduled to” meaning of (be) to, but it often has a distinct meaning in headlines.
This can appear within speech act verbs, like this recent Bloomberg headline Inco Indonesia Says Fire to Crimp Weekly Output by 1 Mln Pounds.
New, another fact about headlines is that if the matrix and immediately subordinate subject are identical, then the second mention is optionally omitted, resulting in: headlines like Iran says will not negotiate on uranium enrichment. Sometimes this results in headlines that I find a bit odd, like India’s United Breweries says wants to keep Taittinger jobs.
How about when the special to is the main predicator in the subordinate clause? Well, the result is this headline that I saw today: Sun Micro says to cut up to 5,000 jobs. The unfortunate thing is that say to already has its own idiomatic meaning (’tell/suggest to someone that they blah’), which results in a very strange headline indeed. Some more examples: KDDI says to offer Sony Walkman phone in Japan, Shanda says to develop online game with Disney, Pacific Ethanol Says to Build Oregon Fuel Plant. These all involve say, mostly because that’s what the initial headline had, but also because it’s easy to search for.
What’s interesting is that it’s totally unclear how one should read a headline like this. If you use “normal” intonation, it sounds like the ’suggest’ meaning. One possibility is to put a pretty big pause between say and to, sort of like there were a colon there. But this still sounds undeniably odd. It’s probably best to do what some organizations did and kill the say, as in Sun to cut up to 5,000 positions.
But now you can read all sorts of normal headlines as having rather funny meanings: consider Dept. of Homeland Security Says to Stop Using IE and Tsunami expert says to expect the unexpected.