Another headline taken from today's issue of the International Herald Tribune:
"The green leap forward", an article by Thomas Friedman about China.
It is quite true of course that "The great leap forward" is an expression which has entered the world's vocabulary rather than that of a particular country, so it is not perhaps the best example of my original point.
But there is another point I would like to make, and that is the essentially derivative nature of so much written expression. So much of what one reads, and newspaper headlines are a particularly vivid example of this, refers back to something else. The reference is often very clever, on occasion witty and sometimes very illuminating, but the fact remains that it is derivative.
My question is - and someone could perhaps do a bit of research here - were the headlines of newspapers and magazines of 50 years ago as derivative as they are today?
No comments:
Post a Comment