You look marvellous

What’s she marvelling at? I’m sure Comic-Con crowds are a sight to behold, and Bettany’s sunglasses look impressively retro in the photographs. But I don’t think that’s what the Daily Mail means here. I think there’s something more ambitious going on.

“Marvel”, the verb, is frequently followed by “at”,  and there is an “at” in this headline. But it’s not right up against the verb, where you would expect it. The preposition that immediately follows the verb  is “in”, introducing a phrase that relates to the dress. So Elizabeth Olsen, I think, is not supposed to be “marvelling … at” the venue or her colleague, or indeed anything else. She’s “marvelling” in a way that celebrities featured in the Mail have previously been known to “stun”, “wow”, “dazzle”, “electrify”, “shimmer” and “amaze”.  She’s looking marvellous.

This type of construction is familiar to tabloid readers: most of the time, they seem to be what you might call “implied object” headlines, since the star in question is usually stunning, wowing or electrifying somebody else  – fans, media, the crowd – not explicitly mentioned. Such headlines reek of journalese, but are easily understood if the verbs are transitive (“electrify”, “amaze”) and clearly propose the idea of a second party. They also work with what are sometimes called “unaccusative” verbs, like “shimmer”, that describe an involuntary state of the subject.

But “marvel” is the kind of intransitive verb that usually demands either an indirect object (“they marvelled at the moon”) or an entire clause as a direct object (“they marvelled to see the moon“). It can stand on its own (“They marvelled.”), but in a sentence containing unrelated prepositional phrases, the risk of misunderstanding is high.

Obviously, as a sub-editor, I find Marvel Comics puns as hard to pass over as anyone else. But I don’t think Grammar Hulk’s going to like this one.

Netflix elliptical

A few words. A glimpse into the heart of conflict. But there’s no space here for specifics.

And that’s the trouble when you’re browsing through Netflix. The way the screen is laid out, there’s only the briefest space to grab your attention when you happen across an interesting film/TV series/documentary. In about 20 words, it’s got to try to engage you, so the summaries are strong on emotion: anger, vengeance, honour, fear, justice, family, love. But they do tend to be a bit vague.

You notice this particularly if you read them shorn of their accompanying title and image. Take this one, for example

It’s so non-specific as to be almost featureless. Could it be The Tempest? Yes. The Count of Monte Cristo? Easily. (In fact, it’s Deadpool.) Similarly, this description of tough action thriller Close Range

could serve quite well as a plot summary for The Code of the Woosters.

If you’re a journalist who has to get your headline through an audience team before it can go up on the web, you see immediately what’s missing here: keywords. What the homepage links need is some SEO. And that’s what they get, eventually, on the more detailed summary page you get if you follow the link. So, none the wiser as to what Close Range might be about, but eager to find out, you click to discover a second sentence, only slightly longer, containing everything to put you in the picture:

Ex-soldier/kidnapped niece/crooked sheriff/drug cartel. Got it. And that’s only 24 words (admittedly with two compounds) compared to the first summary’s 19.

Similarly, this

becomes a lot clearer when some detail is added,

not least the key information that it’s a kidnapping/imprisonment drama set in Thailand.

The more you look, the more you start to think that journalism skills are slightly more transferable to other spheres than is often  believed. It wouldn’t be difficult, for a sub trained to spot a news angle and move it to the top of the article, to fix these. I wonder if Netflix would ever employ any editors? Facebook does, sort of, although not for this.

A man with a remote. The glimmer of an idea. This time, anything could happen.