In my perfect world, there would be little difference between desire and reality. When I had an idea, for a story or a film for example, I would be able to create that with only a minimum of effort. Then I could go on to the next wonderful idea. If I wanted to learn something, like a language, it would be very easy. All I would have to do is read through the grammar and vocabulary once, understand it intellectually, and then I would be able to speak that language perfectly. Continue reading »

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Not long after I took my seat on the train this afternoon, the guy sitting next to me said ‘Excuse me, can you tell me what this means?’ He was holding open a copy of mX – the free ‘newspaper’ available Monday to Friday from train stations in Sydney – and pointing to the headline of an article. It said something like:

SYDNEY BUTTS OUT, BUT BUTTS GET BIGGER

Or something like that – I was pretty tired after a long day at work. I had to look at it a few times to work out what the headline meant, so I felt a bit sorry for the guy who asked me, because he’d had no chance of working it out by himself.

The confusion is obviously the use of butt, which is actually quite a common and useful word to know. The problem is that it has quite a few uses (not limited to these):

1. Cigarette Butt: The end of a cigarette, generally the filter, which some stupid people still throw on the ground.
2. Butt: Another word for bottom, rear, rectum, bum, derrière, etc. Famously used by Sir Mix-A-Lot in the song Baby Got Back.
3. to butt heads with someone: when you’re having a disagreement with someone. For example, if I was talking to someone who believed that it was a good idea to execute criminals who commit certain crimes, I could say that ‘We butted heads on the issue of capital punishment.’
4. to butt out: when you tell someone to butt out, you’re basically telling them to mind their own business. If I was having an argument with my girl friend, for example, and my mum started taking my girl friend’s side in the argument, I would probably tell my mum to ‘butt out and let us handle it’.

So which ones of these was the headline using? At first glance I thought they were using (4) and (2), but really it was (1) and (2). As far as I could tell, the story was basically saying that the amount of smokers in Sydney had gone done (they had put their cigarette BUTTS OUT for the last time) but that people had gotten fatter (their BUTTS were BIGGER).

Newspaper headlines can be cryptic like this sometimes, especially for a non-native speaker. Personally, the style annoys me a little, especially when the person writing the headline is trying to be funny, witty, or make a pun (a play on words). My main problem is that often, in an attempt to be clever, the writer makes a headline which doesn’t really reflect what the article is about.

I don’t know if this was the case with the mX article, because I didn’t bother reading the whole thing after I’d translated the heading for my fellow passenger.

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