Headline

Ah, local papers, you have to love 'em. I remember once the Bradford Telegraph and Argus had a poster campaign that said, in big letters:

DULL DULL DULL DULL DULL - The Bradford Telegraph and Argus

And then, underneath, in much smaller letters:

It isn't.

Wickedly clever marketing campaign, eh? Stroke of genius. Except that when you moved more than about a yard away you couldn't read the "It isn't" bit of it, so you ended up with rather the opposite message to that which was intended. The campaign really stuck, though, at least with us lot, so that whenever anyone says the word "Dull" in this house somebody else can be relied upon to chime in with "Bradford Telegraph and Argus!"

And it may be an apocryphal story - I so hope it isn't - but I've heard that, when the Titanic sank, the headline in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus the next day was:

BRADFORD MAN DROWNS

A copy of the Manchester Evening News came into my possession on Wednesday, even though I was nowhere near Manchester. I confess I found it on the train and no newspaper is safe from me. In fact, nothing with printed words is safe from me, at least until after I've had a brief look at it and decided it's not worth reading any further.

There was a headline in this paper that, for a few minutes, I just couldn't understand.

CASH OFFER TO FIRE CHIEFS WHO HIRE ETHNIC RECRUITS

Now it was the end of a very long day, remember, and I'd been playing a woman with mania all day, and - oh, look, to cut a long story short I'd been up since four in the morning and my brain wasn't, perhaps, at its sharpest.

But my first thought was that someone called Mr. Cash, probably a member of the Nazi Party, was proposing to sack any business bosses who hired any people from ethnic minorities.

Then I realised that couldn't make sense, as then the sentence would have read "CASH OFFERS" - - etc, with an S on the end of OFFER.

Then I realised that CASH means MONEY. So I thought that somebody - as yet unspecified - was bribing Those in Power to sack any bosses of any company at all which hired ethnic minorities.

It still didn't quite make sense so I was reduced to actually reading the story.

And then I found out that fire was not as in "sack" or "get rid of" but as in "thing you make by rubbing two sticks together" and as in "that thing that burns buildings to the ground".

And what it turned out to be about was that the bosses of the Fire Service in Manchester are being given cash incentives to hire more people from ethnic minorities. Oh yes, and more women, but we didn't sound interesting enough to make a headline out of.

I'm glad we've cleared that up. Wonderful thing, the English Language. I'm off to practise climbing ladders and sliding down poles now.