OF HEADLINES AND HEAD SPIN-INDUCING CONTENT

The language used by the press should communicate or convey information in a very direct and comprehensible manner. This means editors, reporters and writers must deliberately align their choice of words with the main aim of making it easy for the reader to understand a story. Sometimes though, one encounters headlines with head spin-inducing content. 

In the front-page teaser of a main article above, the paper deploys a rather confusing or, shall we say, unusual sentence construction.

It starts with:

'How fatally ill patients...'

That means patients who have already succumbed to their illness, no?

And if that be the case, then the second part of this headline gets eerily weird.

'....get set for death'.

Cue the head spin!

Fatal conveys a sense of finality or culminating in demise, or a not so pleasant fate.

So fatally ill patients, one would expect, are not in a position to do pretty much anything, because the illness has already resulted in fatality.

There are those on the verge of dying, that this newspaper story seeks to highlight their final moments and decisions.

This time around, the headline of the main article makes reference to, 'terminally ill patients', which gives room to suggest they can still do something, ahead of their sunset moment.