Long Before Hackers, Hacks
At a demented research institute named for William Morris, eager eyes gaze at a computer that can handle UHL, or “Unit Headline Language”. A survey is conducted, in which people are shown the random headlines:
ROW HOPE MOVE FLOP
LEAK DASH SHOCK
HATE BAN BID PROBE
A total of 86.4 % of those responding say that they understand the headlines, though of this total a depressing number cannot quite say why.
(Michael Frayn, The Tin Men.)
Christopher Hitchens’s : Fleet Street’s finest is a hilarious round-up of the portrayals of journalists by novelists.
The above extract reminds me of the newspaper headlines and advertising catchlines in Russell Hoban’s Kleinzeit, a great comic novel that deserves to be better known.