Should headlines be considered off-topic?

Question

The issue of whether headlines and "headlinese" is on-topic came up because of the question “petition on X” in “Response to We The People Petition on the Protests in Hong Kong”. I don't think it was a great question in its initial form and I'm a little conflicted about whether analyzing the grammar and vocabulary in a headline is something that would be a good use of the community's time. There was a comment in the discussion under the question indicating that someone else felt headlines were off-topic, so I decided to bring it up here.

On one hand, news headlines and news articles are important for English learners to be able to understand. On the other hand, headlines by their very nature are non-standard English. They aren't complete sentences, the language is contorted to be overly concise, and there's a huge dollop of idiom and wordplay thrown in to grab reader's attention.

I feel that they are on-topic under the "Practical problems you encounter while learning English" part of the "What topics can I ask about here?". I think there is some value to helping learners decipher headlines and understand what parts of them aren't standard English because a grammar reference or dictionary isn't going to be that helpful. However, the question I linked above had way too much abstract discussion to keep it squarely in the "practical problem" category, so I wouldn't hold up that particular question as the shining example of when a headline would be on-topic.

What do y'all think?

Answer 1

Headlinese is closely related to Standard English. Here's how it's described by Wikipedia:

Because space is limited, headlines are written in a compressed telegraphic style, using special syntactic conventions:

• Forms of the verb "to be" are omitted.
• Articles are usually omitted.
• Most verbs are in the simple present tense, e.g. "Governor signs bill".
• The future is expressed as "to" followed by a verb, e.g. "Governor to sign bill".
• In the US (but not the UK), conjunctions are often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".
• To save space, a long word sometimes replaced by a shorter word with not quite the same meaning, e.g. "attack" to mean "criticize".

Headlines are generally sentences or noun phrases.

Of these, the two main departures from Standard English are the omission of articles and forms of be, while the use of the simple present, to-future, and asyndetic coordination can all be described as characteristic style choices.

And that's all there is to it. We're done describing it! Headlinese is highly conventionalized and closely related to Standard English. It's not haphazard or ill-defined―after all, it's meant to be understood by English speakers! And that wouldn't be possible if the grammar were constantly reinvented on the spot. It is true that headlines are occasionally poorly written and hard to understand, but the same is true of Standard English sentences, and we haven't yet decided that Standard English is off-topic.

What's more, reading headlines is a skill that almost every learner needs. Excluding questions about headlines from ELL categorically wouldn't help anyone; it would only hurt the site and its users. Let's not make that mistake.