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Ask HN: Conjunctions in Headlines and Article Titles?

1 points by firefoxman1 ↗ HN
Why don't news organizations use "and" "but" and similar words in their titles? It makes it hard to read and I sometimes misinterpret the meaning when there's just a comma instead of a conjunction. Where did this originate, and does this annoy anyone else?

3 comments

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there
i'd have to imagine it started with newspapers doing it to save space on the page
firefoxman1
That seems like the only reason that makes sense.
tokenadult
Newspapers all over the world use different grammatical conventions in headlines from articles. I read Chinese, and Chinese-language newspapers also have headlines that look quite bizarre in isolation. As the first kind reply here said, this convention probably began to save space for "banner" headlines in large type.