A few weeks ago, when Carol Ann Duffy became Britain's first female Poet Laureate, I was surprised to see her praising the headlines in the Sun newspaper as ‘brilliant poetry’.

She said her favourite Sun headline was ‘You can’t quit quicker than a thick Quick quitter’ — referring to the resignation of Bob Quick, Britain’s senior counter-terrorism officer.

However, in writing about Duffy (pictured), the Sun described her as ‘the lesbian mum of one’ and said she had been ‘named the Queen’s official bard’. These are typical examples of popular newspaper language — the peculiar style of writing known as ‘journalese’.

In its definition of journalese, the Oxford English Dictionary uses a quaint old phrase: ‘penny-a-liner’s English’. According to the OED, a penny-a-liner is someone who is paid a penny per line and hence means ‘a writer of material of low literary quality’. The Concise Oxford Dictionary is more straightforward in defining journalese as ‘a hackneyed writing style supposedly characteristic of journalists’.

Of course this does not apply to any of the journalists working for this magazine or its associated newspaper: they are all beyond reproach. But journalese is certainly a feature of many tabloid newspapers.

‘Tabloid’ was originally registered as a trademark in 1884 by a drug company to describe a tablet of compressed medicine. It came to be used of a compressed or concentrated version of something, and hence applied to a newspaper with pages half as big as those of the broadsheets (although many respectable papers have changed to the tabloid format). The OED adds that tabloid newspapers are ‘usually characterized as popular in style and dominated by sensational stories’.

Keith Waterhouse said that “Popular journalism . . . is one of the most deadening influences” on our language. A fascinating book by Simon Bessie entitled Jazz Journalism (1938) stated: “The tabloid identified itself with the common people . . . and spoke their language”. He might more truly have said that the tabloids purported to speak the common language but, in the process, created a jargon of their own.

Mediocre journalists deliberately use what they regard as punchy, colloquial expressions, simulating what they think is the language of ordinary people. So cosmetic surgery becomes a ‘boob job’, any accusation is a ‘rap’, and the Sun's most famous headline is ‘GOTCHA’, insensitively describing the sinking of a battleship in which more than 300 people died.

Bad journalists favour such buzz-words as ordeal, shock, horror, terror, carnage, crackdown, and bizarre. An inferno is always blazing; havoc is generally wreaked; economies or cuts are habitually swingeing; blondes are usually stunning; and a heroic man or woman is always brave.

Much of this supposedly trendy language is not actually employed by most ordinary people. Do you ever call an investigation a ‘probe’, a promiscuous person a ‘love rat’, sexual activity a ‘romp’, or a hurried attempt to help someone a ‘mercy dash’?

Thankfully, this means that some journalese has not penetrated our everyday speech, but newspapers have popularised such expressions as ‘chav’, ‘hoodies’, ‘stunner’, ‘state-of-the-art’, ‘brain drain’, ‘road rage’, ‘road map’ (for any kind of plan) and ‘U-turn’. Sports reporters have left us with ‘over the moon’ and ‘sick as a parrot’.

Tabloids may also have contributed to the abbreviated style of language used in adverts, texting, etc. The modern desire for speed is met by making stories as short and simple as possible. And lazy journalists resort to clichés to get a job done as quickly as possible.

The use of such clichés becomes a habit. Private Eye recently contained a cartoon showing a journalist saying to a doctor: “I can't stop putting the word ‘gate’ after everything I write . . . gate”.

The hastiness of journalism often results in puzzling or ambiguous headlines. Headlines are written to attract attention, even to a trivial story. As G K Chesterton remarked: “Journalism largely consists in saying ‘Lord Jones dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive”.

Headlines can sacrifice grammar and good sense in the desire for brevity or effect. Recent Sun headlines include: LUNG CANCER LOTTERY; LOO SEX PAIR GET STUCK IN; 4 SEIZED ON DEAD FIREMEN; and MAN SMUGGLED BIRDS IN SOCKS. The Evening Standard was guilty of the ambiguous headline EIGHTH ARMY PUSH BOTTLES UP GERMANS.

Journalese also arises from some papers’ tendency to sensationalise, exaggerate or even make up stories: habits that often lead to sloppy English. Several decades ago, the journalist Lou Wedemar summed up the tabloids’ bias in this verse: Oh, print us news without much news Of nudes and sheiks and racing horses, Knife battles, mobs, kidnapping clues, Fire-setting fiends, love-theft divorces, Let's have some warships, railroad wrecks, A riot caused by racial trouble, True stories, contests and some sex — Why, in a week your sales will double.

For THAT’S THE STUFF WE LIKE!

Tony Augarde is the author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games (OUP, £14.99) and The Oxford A to Z of Word Games (OUP, £4.99)