EXPOSES NEW HEADLINE GAME AS INTERESTING DEVICE!

In Which an Earnest Cassandra Warns of the Approach of Another National Menace

COREY FORD

THE tabloid newspapers started it. You can blame the tabloids. Myself, I have no connection with it whatsoever. All I am doing here is just mentioning it: and nobody need accuse me a few weeks hence of having been the first to foist this latest Parlor Game on a suffering public. I'll only deny it.

Because I want to stop it. I want to nip it in the bud. Perhaps, if I warn people about it in time, we can all unite together as a nation and suppress this new sport of "Hokum Headlines", and I won't have to go to Europe to avoid it. I just came home from Europe last week when I heard that the "Ask Me Another" craze had died down a little; and it seems a darned shame to have to turn around and start right back again.

I try to warn people about it; and they only laugh at me. I go around and button-hole them in the street, I plead with them, I argue myself black in the face; and still they refuse to listen to reason. And every day the awful flood is gathering; and some fine morning it is going to break on the startled public with a deafening roar, and everybody will be trying it out on everybody else, and all the magazines will take it up, and someone will publish a "Hokum Headlines Book", and twenty satirists will burlesque it, and Professor Thorndyke will deny that the game has any educational advantages; and in the midst of it there I'll he on the high seas again. It's coming.

It's coming, as sure as fate. As a nation we are Parlor-Game-mad. The craze has swept us like a gigantic sea. Last year's fads still swamp the hinterlands in a wide, shallow back-wash; new crazes meantime march steadily from coast to coast in successive billows, toppling and spilling down upon the West in a foamy confusion as yet a new breaker combs out of New York and rushes hissing over Chicago to overtake the first. The most persistent levees crumble; one publishing house after another quits its foundations and races headlong with the yellow flood. Families put on their rubbers and take to the treetops in vain. The hard, sucked beach of our national intelligence is littered with water-logged question-books, stubs of pencils, used crossword puzzle sheets, old rubber erasers, soggy intelligence ratings, here and there an abandoned dinner-guest buried upside down to his waist in the damp sand.

It's coming. I saw it happen with CrossWord Puzzles. Nobody listened to me then. They had seen them now and then in the Sunday papers, to be sure; but they thought nothing of it at the time. They solved them occasionally in the New York World. The first Cross-Word Puzzle Book struck everybody merely as a harmless way to pass half an hour in the train. God help them, they even bought a copy. And some have not recovered yet.

"Ask Me Another" broke upon the public before we had fairly gotten onto our feet again, and swept us head over heels in its boiling flood. One moment we were a nation of amiable and contented citizens, going to and from our work with peace in our hearts; the next, we had become a race of mental inquisitors, exposing each other's intelligence quotas with the same diabolic glee we used to have in finding out their income taxes, breaking up a happv dinner-party to discover what tvpe of internal combustion motor is made to burn heavy oils, or levelling our prying forefinger into a contented fireside to inquire who assumed leadership of the Mormon Church after the death of Joseph Smith in 1844, or what is a therm?

Milder combers continue to swamp us in its wake. Missing Title Contests, Alibi Contests, Luckv Number Contests roll in upon us in dizzy succession. "\⅝ ho Is This? teases us each morning in the World. Numerology still has its day. Every so often they trisect our better Presidents and reassemble them in lurid combinations for us to unscramble, and frantically we remove Lincoln's chin from McKinley's nose in order to find John Quincy Adams. And on the heels of them all. rearing its white crest higher than all the rest, "Hokum Headlines" looms gradual and insidious. And. with my fingers in the dyke, 1 am trying to warn the public in time.

CAN YOU SOLVE THESE HOKUM HEADLINES?

A Sample Questionnaire of Our Newest National Sport

Here is a sample Hokum Headline, similar to the headlines presented daily by our tabloid newspapers. Given the familiar words "GARTER" and "LOVER", what can you evolve?

The winning solution below was reached by an eminent ecclesiast, the New York Journal s star contributor, in one minute and thirty-six seconds:

GARTER SNAKE MENACE DECLARED ALL OVER

Another Hokum Headline, solved by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler in one minute flat; also by Miss Amide MacPherson in one minute and ten seconds and by Mr. Gene Tunney, with help, in two minutes, six seconds:

BEATS RIVAL AIRMEN; IS GREETED BY WIFE!

This one, by a well-known editor, was produced in just forty-nine seconds:

BOSTON CRITICS DENOUNCE HEYWARD NOVEL P ORGY

So far the following Hokum Headlines have not been solved:

STRANGLES . HUSBAND

GIRL . WHIPPED

SHEIK . SLAIN

NAKED . REVEL

Perhaps YOU will be the lucky winner!

Someone sitting opposite you in tbe subway, for example, is holding a copy of tin* Graphic spread open in front of her; and your wandering eve catches the screaming headline: "COOLIDGE DEAD!" You Mart to your feet, just as the ladv folds the paper inside out and shuts an\ further developments from your gaze. M\ gosh, though, that's awful! Why. that's a national calamity! Coolidge dead! They should be calling extras by now. You jump off the car at the next station, grab a Graphic from the news-stand, and stare horrorstricken at the headline again.

And as you stare at it more closely, you make out for the first lime some little words you hadn't seen before, jammed in fine type between the two big black screamers. "COOLIDGE" is there, sure enough; and then, very tiny indeed: i ^niViG muUM;and. very big again: "DEAD!" And you stuff the paper quietly into a Refuse Can, and wait twent\ minutes for another express. And vou think tilings.

Hello, what's all this? "LINDBERGH WED!" Well, you knew that kid would fall for Paris. Mm stare over your neighbors shoulder and examine the headline more closely:

LINDBERGH COMPETENT PH.OT. PARIS FLIGHT SHO WED!

You don't know it; but from that time on you are a marked man. The thing has gotten into your blood. Perhaps you figure out one or two of your own on the back of an envelope, just to show to the hoys in the office, j oil try them on the family that night. In a day or two vou have become a fan. You compose them in the bath, at the breakfast table, on the tenniscourts. You spread the germs wherever you go. Y mi are obsessed. Y ou can no longer enjoy a mild art criticism in the Times, without writing vour own Hokum Headline:

RUINS OF GREEK PARTHENON NOW BEING SHOWN IN MODEL

ARTIST HELD EXHIBITION IN ART GALLERY YESTERDAY

Nor are you satisfied to keep it to yourself. You corner a group after a dinner-party, just at the moment when each guest sinks into a deep chair feeling personally as though he had swallowed a damp wash-rag and would like nothing better than to be allowed to sleep for five or ten minutes; and with a maniac grin you present them with any two words: "Naked" and "Revel", "Girl" and "Whipped", "Secrets" and "Sex". Then you take out a stop-watch and time them; and the first person to evolve a Hokum Headline can get his hat and go home. And they'll work like bees!

The prize-winning Hokum Headline of tinabove list was completed in the record time of thirty-two seconds:

SECRETS OF BEE-KEEPING REVEALED IN SUSSEX

And if the thing ever reaches the point of a national craze (and the tabloids are whipping it to a white flame daily) there is just one other masterpiece you can expect to find almost any day now:

BREAKS NECK IN LEAP FROM FIFTY-SECOND STORY WINDOW

Corey Ford Jumps from Wool worth Tower; Flames Hokum Headlines in Dying Gasp And there won't be any hokum about that.