WORD PLAY NEWSPAPER GAME

Newspaper headlines can often be ambiguous (understood in two different ways) because they are written with the minimum of words…

Look at these examples to see if you can understand the intended meaning as well as the accidental one :

Drunk gets 9 months in violin case.

2 sisters reunited after 18 years at checkout counter.

Man eating pirahna mistakenly sold as pet fish.

Queen Mary having bottom scraped.

Safety experts says bus passengers should be belted.

Kids make nutricious snacks.

12 on their way to cruise among dead in plane crash.

Lack of brains hinders research.

Iraqi head seeks arms.

Squad helps dog bite victim.

Red tape holds up new bridge.

Astronaut takes blame for gas in spacecraft.

2 soviet ships collide, one dies.

Miners refuse to work after death.

Milk drinkers are turning to powder.

Juvenile court to try shooting defendant.

Killer sentenced to die for second time in 10 years.

It really highlights how important it is to think about what you’re writing doesn’t it? More importantly, I hope that it gives you an idea of how you could DELIBERATELY include some word play in your writing and poems when you want to have a humorous effect.

I find that specifically thinking of ideas for word play is difficult, but they tend to come to me by accident, or when I notice mistakes like these, and then I expand on the idea.  Any poems that I have written which include word play are listed in the poem category above (FIGURATIVE POEMS, WORD PLAY)