Story #41: Puntastic and irreverent ✝️
Newsletter headlines from the other side
G’day stranger! Many thanks for your patience as my planned hiatus ended up being longer than expected.
The reason? I moved to Australia. Which, if you’re counting, is the other side of the planet from where I had been living (Vancouver) and well, that just took a lot of time and brain power. And here we are.
And in that spirit, I wanted to have a look at the quirk and wonder that is Australian English.
The story
Hobart’s the capital of Tasmania, the southernmost state of Australia. Hobart’s a bigger city than you’ll find elsewhere in Tasmania, but it’s still a pretty small city. Its main (only?) newspaper is called The Mercury. And you often see things on the front page of the Mercury that wouldn’t make the newspaper at all in another city.
This was the headline of The Mercury on January 4, 20121.
CROSS PRIEST IN BUN FIGHT.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more glorious headline, and I don’t think I ever will.
The “bun fight” in question is the sale of hot cross buns in January, a full four months before Easter when they are traditionally made.
For the uninitiated, a hot cross bun is a fruit-studded roll, glazed with syrup and finished with a white cross on the top. They are typically sold in groups of 6 but I suppose you could also buy one at a time. The cross is meant to be a symbol of Jesus’ sacrifice and subsequent resurrection, which is the point of Easter and I suppose also the entire point of Christianity.
I digress.
In Vancouver, we also got hot cross buns slightly early but it didn’t seem to bother anyone, at least not to the point of making front-page news. If anything, it was exciting because it was the only time you could get anything resembling a hot-cross bun, and so the longer the hot-cross-bun season, the better.2
But in Australia, bakeries make the fruit bun base all year round. You can walk into a reputable bakery in July, November, February, and get a fruit bun. Six if you want, a dozen if you’re kooky. So it’s not the availability of the fruit bun that’s an issue—it’s that in the months leading up to Easter, bakeries add a swizzle of royal icing and ta-da! your everyday fruit bun has been transformed into a hot cross bun.
Which, apparently, caused some hubbub. Which was captured by this headline.
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Why it works
First, consider the word economy, which is basically the ability to transmit as much information in as few words as possible. Word economy is even more important for print newspapers. With print, you don’t have the benefit of digital, in which you can be as descriptive and keyword-laden as you want to be, because with print you have precisely this-many-centimetres-of-print.
And if you work for The Mercury, you may also have some sort of mandate to be as punny as possible (based on my highly unscientific observation of back issues of The Mercury over the past decade or so).
Second, there’s the wordplay. It’s clever to combine “cross” and “priest” which are associated words, but in this case we’re using cross not in a religious context, but to mean angry.
Then, there’s the sheer absurdity of “bun fight” which conjures images of, I don’t know, nuns and priests chucking soft dinner rolls at each other, giggling and barefoot while The Sound of Music plays on big-screen in the background.
Put it together and you get CROSS PRIEST IN BUN FIGHT and it’s magnificent.
What we can learn from it
First, don’t mess with the church?
No, seriously. I love this playfulness of language. You don’t get to write a headline like that without recognizing that “cross” has two meanings, and that you can play with people’s expectations of which one to expect. There’s a love of language here, and an irreverence (especially given the subject matter) that I would love to see more of and elsewhere.
Is it particular to The Mercury? Kind of. I’ve made a point of noting headlines from The Mercury at other times, although this one is still my favourite.
I did appreciate this page-two blurb from a more recent issue, and am glad to know The Mercury staff share my love of puns and Prince. (For you non-Prince fans, the headline is a play off the song “When Doves Cry.”)
I’m still not certain whether this sense of humour is particular to The Mercury, to Hobart, to Tasmania or to Australia.
I don’t think it’s Australian, as the papers from Sydney and Melbourne seem much more buttoned up, save for this Weekend Australian headline after the Queen’s passing. However, it came several days after The New York Times published an op-ed by Maureen Dowd with the same Charles in Charge reference, so I don’t think it’s a good data point for mainland Australian headline humour. But I’m a sucker for a Scott Baio joke so I’ll leave it here anyway.
I do think it’s indicative of the general irreverence of Australian language and humour. For example, in North America we might say “he’s got a screw loose,” to describe someone who’s not all mentally there. In Australia, they’d say “he’s got a roo loose in the upper paddock,” which is far more vivid. Roo is short for kangaroo, and so to be slightly unhinged is to have a kangaroo bouncing around your brain.
Share this newsletter like you’d share a shrimp on the bahhbie with Crocodile Dundee.
In other words, I have been waiting nearly 11 years to talk about this newspaper headline. Also, that’s Bess on the left and Peggy on the right. Don’t let their expressions phase you; they are also super excited to dissect this headline. RIP to both of them.
I’m old enough to remember when Cadbury Mini Eggs were introduced and you could only get them at Easter, but suddenly there were Halloween eggs and Christmas eggs and now you can get mini eggs any damn time you want. Kids these days have no idea.