this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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Something like "Foreign ministers of Italy, France set to meet blablabla". There's just two parties being mentioned and yet no "and". Makes me do a double take every time.

Asking because that's not a thing in German and I've only started noticing it recently but since then I've seen it a lot.

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[–] IndieSpren@lemmy.blahaj.zone 71 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

It's a thing that comes from the era of printed newspapers. Every word took up valuable space and cost a lot of ink when printed on millions of papers.

If you could cut a word from a headline and still make perfect sense to readers, you did it. There were no sentences which readers couldn't understand if you replaced all the ands with commas, so it became the standard for newspaper headlines to do so.

[–] Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 17 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

That's interesting. Especially because like I said it's not a thing in German. They used to use just an ampersand to be space efficient. I like those unique sorts of quirks. Reminds me of the "etaoin shrdlu" thing. Also no German equivalent.

[–] Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Fewer letters made room to use a larger type-size and still fit on one line. I don't know, but maybe the comma only needed a half space, & the ampersand needed a whole? They are cuter though.

I'm sure some meticulous German has calculated which letters are use most frequently, I wonder what "name" it would spell?

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

We know it primarily from context switching. It's a thing very specific to headline-speak

Ironically when looking up "context switching" I got programming results. Apparently Wikipedia refers to the language thing as "code switching".

[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl -4 points 2 weeks ago

#Man Attacks Hampster!

[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 35 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Don't know, I'm just here to state my absolute hate for the practice. Sure you don't write "A and B and C and D", but "A, B, C, and D".
However, "A, B" is absolutely awful.

[–] boydster@sh.itjust.works 31 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Upvoted purely for the use of the Oxford comma.

[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 22 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

It tends to remove ambiguity

[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 11 points 2 weeks ago

And panties.

[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 2 weeks ago

I feel the pause of the Oxford comma when I speak. Always throws off the rhythm of a sentence when I don't see it in text.

[–] Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 4 points 2 weeks ago

Another thing that used to interrupt my reading flow. I've since come around though.

[–] Opinionhaver@feddit.uk 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

As a non-native english speaker this headline format bothers me to no end. I guess the intention is to make it shorter but I simply just find it confusing.

[–] Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 10 points 2 weeks ago

I'm more used to it now but it still interrupts my reading flow because I anticipate that a third party will be mentioned and yet the enumeration stops after two.

[–] br3d@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It's a very American style thing. UK English media don't do this, and it always feels strange when I see it in US media

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 9 points 2 weeks ago

Weirdly, as a non-native speaker I find UK headlines even harder to read.

[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 7 points 2 weeks ago

My whole life, yeah.

[–] loppy@fedia.io 3 points 2 weeks ago

You made me realize this is actually pretty common in math, e.g. "Let x, y be real numbers" instead of "Let x and y be real numbers". I imagine this comes from the infuence of notation like "Let x, y ∈ ℝ".

[–] adespoton@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 weeks ago

Eats Shoots and Leaves