2y ago

Poland: Abortion Witch Hunt Targets Women, Doctors

4 comments

Stuff like this makes me very angry 😤 and I’m a person who normally is not angry at all.. Just let the women and her bodies alone!
I apologize for the unrelated question, but does anyone know why some headlines are so scared to use the word 'and'? The comma is so out of place and makes it unecessarly hard to read
- In this example the word 'and' could convey:
  that the only parts of society affected are women and doctors (implies a finite list)
  that the 'and' itself implies a 'we thought it was just affecting women, but it also affects doctors too?! Who knew?!'
  The comma in this example provides a list effect, it's naming two groups but not implying that they're the only ones affected.
- Back when news was printed on paper, they needed to make the space taken up by a headline count, since it uses a much larger font. The space taken up by a 36pt "AND" could easily be a couple paragraphs of 11pt text. Because of this, the journalism industry developed its own version of English grammar for headlines which was meant to be economical with printing space while being punchy and attention-grabbing, and also being as unambiguous as possible.
  This syntax has survived into the age of digital news because of industry conventions.