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Journalism of Courage
In the news media, headlines are meant to grab attention. A catchy one can entice the reader and hold her hand gently till she has gone through the content appearing below it. Since a headline’s beauty lies in its brevity, midnight’s oil is burnt on newspaper and magazine desks to work out smart and concise headlines. This calls for employing lateral thinking and tropes of language like pun, metaphor, simile, symbolism, etc. Since headlines have to say more in less about real incidents, that’s where layers of meanings are added to words and expressions.
Here’s a pick of five words out of many from headlines in the year gone by that had me picking up a dictionary. It was not that I did not know the meaning every time. More often, it was to look up their etymology and understand their figurative usage.
The last month of the year also saw its most popular event — the FIFA World Cup. It was, therefore, natural that Argentina’s win will have newspapers playing with words to tell the story. So, the print edition of The Indian Express went to town with the headline: Messianic Night. Another newspaper said ‘Messimerising’.
Messianic is the adjective form of messiah. In contemporary use, a messiah is someone who brings big changes in society or to a political system in an extremely determined and enthusiastic way. The word comes from the Messiah (which stands for Jesus Christ in Christianity) who was sent by God into the world to save people from evil and sin. The Messiah (in Judaism) is a king who will be sent by God to save the Jewish people.
The second headline played on the word mesmerizing, derived from the name of Friedrich A. Mesmer who created a sensation in the 18th century by asserting that there existed a universal power and termed it animal magnetism. In course of time, this power acquired the name mesmerism, mesmerizing being its adjective form. The verb mesmerize is used in the sense of ‘to hypnotize’, ‘to spellbind’.
Both the headlines touched on the stellar performance of Argentine captain Lionel Messi.
Another story was headlined ‘Heartbreak for hat-trick hero Mbappe in humdinger’. Humdinger stands for a person as well as a thing that is remarkably excellent. The headline made a good use of alliteration while referring to not only Mbappe, another star performer, but also to a final which was an on-the-edge tussle.
The next is also from a sports headline which talked about the English juggernaut, making a whitewash of the Test series on the Pakistani soil for the first time.
The word has an interesting etymology. It comes from Jagannatha, a Hindu God whose most famous temple in India is in Puri, Odisha. For centuries, during an annual festival in the town, a huge idol of the God is mounted on a rath (chariot) and pulled by worshippers in a procession. The legend has it that devotees will throw themselves before the wheels of the Jagannatha’s rath to get rid of the cycle of births. The accounts of the event caught the imagination of the West and so Jagannatha altered to juggernaut acquired a negative connotation. It is used to mean an enormous, ruthlessly crushing force or for a person who acts like that.
The last in this list is a word which is a Yiddish borrowing. Yiddish itself is derived mostly from Hebrew and German. The word chutzpah had a negative connotation to start with. Today it is used also in a positive sense. It could define gall, insolence, arrogance or even supreme self-confidence.
A large number of Yiddish words, irresistibly punchy, have made the English language their home. We will have a look at them sometime later.
