Titles With Colons: And Other Such Oddities

Frequenter(s) of this blog are, by now, familiar with the author’s particular stylistic proclivities.¹ One such propensity is my use of titles that happen to have colons; in other words, Titles With Colons.

Thanks to Grammar Girl for sponsoring this blog post.

To the best of my knowledge — which, to be fair, is limited — there is no dictum for or against having a title with a colon. More than anything, the phrase proceeding the colon (the colon-subsequent, if you will) is a subtitle necessitated by the ambiguity of the phrase preceding the colon (the colon-precedent, if you will).² I am most familiar with the Colonic Title construction in order to strengthen the click-baitiness of a post. This use-case falls exactly into the category described above. The colon-precedent — the click-bait — gives no context as to the content of the article while the colon-subsequent clues the reader into what is being written. See examples below:

1. Mango Diplomacy: Bangladesh PM sends 2600 kgs Haribhanga mangoes for PM Modi, Mamata Banerjee (Mint)
2. TikTok and Fashion Agree: That Side Part Makes You Look Old (WSJ)
3. The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Barack Obama)³
4. Phenomenology v. Reality: A Case Study of Queso (Me)

The first is a canonical example of the precendent-subsequent structure. Mango diplomacy — an esoteric phrase by most standards — is followed by the key content of the article. The second follows a similar structure, though the colon-precedent is fairly dumb. The third reverses the trend of the second. The colon-subsequent is, well, audaciously hopeful (i.e. dumb). The fourth, my favorite of the quartet, is an exemplar of the colon model. An unintelligible precedent followed by a teaser of content.⁴

This title format is fairly non-standard in “real” journalism, though as a stand-in many outlets use questions in their titles (e.g. here, here, and meta-use here). Recently, I found out about Betteridge’s law of headlines which cites that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” This is good advice for any of us that encounter a “Hot Single Moms In Your Area?” headline. By my — and Betteridge’s — standards, question marks are cop-outs. Though they seek to achieve a similar goal as Titles With Colons, they leave less to the imagination. Besides, we see (and hear) question marks every day; writers are much charier of using colons.

Now, vis-à-vis the colon-subsequent of this article, I point the reader toward one of my favorite lines from the Louis-Dreyfus canon (Veep). See below from an article with a Colonic Title itself:

Other Such Oddities, indeed.

[1] Some self-identified tendencies include unreasonably high usage of em-dashes, unnecessarily strong adverbs, and unattractively numbered footnotes. More can be thought of by the reader, I am sure.

[2] Note that proceeding and preceding are, in fact, antonyms. Unfortunately, proceedent is not a word as of the publication date.

[3] Yes, I just put Barack Obama’s bestseller right before my first blog post. And?

[4] It was sufficiently click-baity for certain unintended consequences; iykyk.