The following story was not written by me, but by my father Glen Ross before his death in 1996. I have wanted to post some of his stories here since I joined, and now seemed like a good time. It is a small excerpt from a longer essay he wrote about his experiences working for Mexico's newspaper in 1958-59. 

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For about a year in 1958 and 1959 I was the editor of El Universal's English section -- a full page in the front section for Spanish readers who wanted to practice reading English. Most of the material I edited was international news from a wire-service teletype.

Due to the unusual requirements of the job, I was the only non-Mexican working on the paper. Some of the Mexican editors I worked with knew English well enough for practical purposes, but the headlines stumped them. To write a dozen or more headlines in a couple of hours, in a language other than your native tongue is like tiptoeing through a mine field. The illogical idioms and maddening nature of prepositions keep all but those who have soaked up a language in childhood from writing headlines. To make the job even more challenging for Mexican editors, headlines in Spanish are in the past tense and in general more formal than English headlines....

Since I had no training or experience in journalism, I had to learn the editor's craft by trial and error. I was not a daring editor. My work was painfully amateurish at first, but I managed to avoid the kind of blunder that had unseated others. My friend Ryan had slammed the door on his own fingers with a bad headline about the impending death of the Pope. In the headline Ryan used a phrase from Dylan Thomas's poem about his father's death:

POPE PIOUS RAGES AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT

That headline is better left unexamined - or better yet, unwritten and unprinted. But there it was, smack at the top of the page in 42-point gotico largo type. It exemplifies a number of mistakes, the first of which is the amateur's fatal impulse to be clever with the news. Second, in this example, the cleverness is not clever. The only link between the Pope and the poem is the idea of dying. The circumstances are not otherwise similar. So the headline is cryptic about a matter that has nothing cryptic to it. Furthermore, it depends on the reader grasping an allusion to a poem which, well-known though it might be to graduate students of English could hardly be counted on to leap immediately into the minds of the readers of El Universal.

The death of a Pope is a solemn matter. It is a kind of representative death, one might say, and an occasion for hushed sobriety. I admit that it is not easy to write a headline that conveys a tone of hushed sobriety, but a Pope who rages against the dying of the light is making news of the man-bites-dog kind. A raging Pope story implies cataclysmic events and at once raises questions. Why is the Pope raging? What does the Pope know that we do not? What are they doing to the Pope? What is going on over there? Relations between the Vatican and Mexico had been suspended for forty years, but there was still an understandable and kindly interest in the Papacy.

That headline proved one thing, at least - that the English section of El Universal had readers who cared. There was a considerable amount of negative feedback which must have cooked Ryan's goose. He was not fired, but when he went to Boston for a visit at Christmas, he wasn't allowed to re-enter the country when he tried to come back. In Mexico it is not only God who works in mysterious ways.

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(This is a postumous Christmas gift for my father, who chose his words carefully, and tried to teach me to do the same. I'm still learning!)