A few weeks back I offered you a word (ain’t) that you’ll hear often but hardly ever see; many other words that appear in print every day are generally, like well-behaved children according to a famous English proverb, seen and not heard.
For most people, the use of the the archaic word woe – meaning “sorrow, misery, unhappiness” – is limited to three fixed phrases: the first, a tale of woe, is an apparently true story of personal disaster that someone tells in order to win your sympathy (or, possibly, financial assistance), or to explain why they were late for your meeting. The second expression, which people will often refer to, or quote, humorously or ironically, is “ [Oh] woe is me!” This is a melodramatic lament, to be found in the two 17th century texts that have most influenced modern English – the works of Shakespeare and the “King James” Bible, and shows woe's derivation from the Old English exclamation “wa!”, related apparently to a number of similar lamentation-exclamations in other languages, from the Latin væ! and the German weh! to the Armenian vay! Ashkenazi Jews are fond of using the Yiddish version “Oy vay iz mir!” as a general expression of annoyance or exasperation. No 21st-century English speaker, however, would seriously exclaim “Woe is me!” although the expression is still so embedded in our consciousness that a contributor to the online Urban Dictionary lists “woe-is-me-ing” as a contemporary verb, meaning “complaining exaggeratedly”.
The third expression, less common these days, is the very archaic-sounding warning (or threat) “Woe betide (x) ” as in “Woe betide you if you don't hand in your homework tomorrow morning..” - It literary means “may sorrow be upon (x)”, but the idea is “(x) will be in big trouble..!”
We sometimes use the adjective “woeful” to mean “terrible; pathetically bad”, as in The prime minister's attempts at humour were woeful, but we will never use woe as standard vocabulary in normal conversation. No-one says “I've got some woes at work,” or “If they pass that new law, there'll be woe.” So why, if I open my newspaper, or my search-engine's news page, am I likely to read headlines such as Millions face financial woe as debt-levels soar (The Independent), or President tries to move past health-care website woes (Yahoo News)?
Why, in fact, are newspapers and web news pages full of stories of “Climate Change woes”, Kanye West's “tour woes”, and a thousand sporting woes from “Mourinho's injury woe” to “Everton's transfer window woe”? Just a Google search for the phrase “parking woes” calls up 143,000 results from news websites around the English speaking world from Cocoa Beach, Florida to Darnick, Scotland. But are the drivers in these places really exclaiming melodramatically, with tears and tragic gestures? Probably not.
The reason why journalists, and particularly the sub-editors who write headlines, love woe, is because it only has three letters, where problem and trouble have seven each. The shorter the word, the bigger you can print your headline, and the more effectively you can grab the reader's attention. On the basis of this simple but fundamental principle, a whole dialect, known as journalese, has evolved over the years, in which which journalists favour less common, but shorter, synonyms to the equivalent words that most people use.
Some other examples of journalese words are:
Bid – much shorter that attempt. If an attempt to beat a world record for building models of the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks happened not to be successful, the story would, in journalese, be headlined “Matchstick Tower Record Bid Fails”.
Wed – This verb, usually heard only in the conversation of elderly speakers of certain regional British dialects, is two letters shorter than marry, and so invariably replaces it. PM to Wed Model means that the Prime Minister is going to marry a model (In news headlines, 'to + Verb (infinitive)' is the future tense).
Rap – this verb, apart from a performing style, really means to hit something (a 'rap across the knuckles' was a traditional teacher's punishment), and is never normally used to mean criticize or condemn. Except in journalese... searching for an example, I typed “EU Court Raps...” into Google – 28,800 results: the first is “EU Court raps Romania Soccer Club for Gay Comments”.
Notice how in the last example the sub-editor has also saved a character-space by avoiding the “n” that would turn Romania
into an adjective. I may decide to complain about this to a body that controls journalistic standards. The headline might read:
Word-man raps sub-ed's bid to solve space woes...
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