Yeovil bars fingerprint revellers
I was cruising the BBC News Player earlier today and happened upon a story with an unusual headline:
Yeovil bars fingerprint revellers
The handy illustrative picture accompanying the story was simply a finger, leaving me none the wiser as to what this headline meant. I was confused.
What on Earth are “fingerprint revellers”, and what have they done to so offend the small town of Yeovil that anyone would attempt to keep them out?
I’m not all that au fait with the latest trends sweeping the world of revelry: could “fingerprint” be a new type of drug, or perhaps an activity? Perhaps it’s a new method of finger-painting graffiti: you could create images which are literally unique, but with the unfortunate downside of leaving biometric identification data behind for the cops chasing you.
So, all cred- and plausibility drained from that avenue of thought, I envisaged that perhaps it was a grammatical error. Is there a missing apostrophe or hyphen? Probably not: even if the fingerprint revellers belong to one or many bars in Yeovil, it still leaves the insurmountable difficulty of what exactly they are. And calling them “fingerprint-revellers” doesn’t do a lot to deconfuse matters.
So, I watched the story. It was about club and pubs—or, to use a catch-all term, bars—fingerprinting—so taking fingerprints from—their revelling patrons.
An entertaining case of the confused lexical categories (with both ‘bar’ and ‘fingerprint’ being usable as either a noun or a verb), and proof that it’s always worth getting someone to read the headline you’ve just cleverly compressed into four words just in case it ends up being material for a ‘blog entry because some idiot with a ‘blog misunderstood what you were trying to convey.
If I worked for the BBC, I’d've clarified things by changing it to “Yeovil clubs fingerprint revellers”. I can see the headlines now: “Statto cracks headlining issues”. The story, presumably, regarding the propensity of my cracks to make headlines. Hang on…
My apologies to anyone who read the headline in the correct sense initially: I did do a survey before trotting this invective out, and five out of my meticulously sampled six were baffled by the headline before I explained it to them. With that kind of undeniable statistical significance, I thought it deserved a bit of derision.
May 2nd, 2006 at 15:28
Hm. I spent the whole first half of this post deeply confused. Mainly because I saw the post title and thought “Why is he writing about pubs taking the fingerprints of revellers?” and then couldn’t work out why you weren’t.
Hey ho. If I worked for the BBC I’d've put “Yeovil bars fingerprint revellers” if I meant the story it actually was, and “Yeovil bans fingerprint revellers” if I was writing about the thing it wasn’t.
But I suppose the argument “but if I meant something else I’d've changed one letter in the second word” isn’t a great argument in favour of potential linguistic fuzziness…
May 5th, 2006 at 21:43
Seems a bit extreme to me - people spend time and money in your towns bars, so you club them ? Bit of a prehistoric form of gratitude isn’t it ?
May 20th, 2006 at 15:44
How about Yeovil pubs fingerprint revellers?
Sacrificing journalistic accuracy for a clearer headline!
Why were they fingerprinting them anyway? I’m intrigued.