The sarcastic fringehead's broad-mouthed display is reserved for fighting | Hacker News Reader

The sarcastic fringehead's broad-mouthed display is reserved for fighting

nytimes.com

81 pointsPetiver27 comments

this is excellent headline writing

When subscription based "premium" newspapers start doling out the click bait, you know the end is near ...

NYT is premium, and newspapers have always had articles on sciences.

It's not clickbait. It's called being clever, and something that newspapers have done for centuries before internet griefers came along.

Idk, there is not much cleverness is finding some random obscure thing and trying to shoehorn that to propel an ideological message.

The article is entirely focused on the fish, though. Where's the ideological message?

In the headline, and the entire article is not about fish. It’s a commentary about society. It dog whistles to their readerbase.

And it's even nearer when links to those articles are posted on HN

It isn't click bait.

The fish is literally called the sarcastic fridgehead.

If the title was "the goldfishes broad mouthed display is reserved for fighting" would that too be clickbait?

The title on HN changed, it was originally posted as something like "When Sarcastic Fringemouths open, beware"

ah "sarcastic" in the literal - ancient Greeks had great words for so many things

My (un)favorite is "demagogue" they knew it even then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue#History_and_definiti...

I feel kinship with this fish.

OMG I've found my spirit animal.

I have to admit this is not what I expected to be reading about when I clicked on it.

It got me too. At least the title doesn’t have an illicit reference to Stripers.

This is the kind of clickbait I can get behind :)

It was so much better than I imagined it would be!

Sometimes the New York Times editors have fun with the titles of lighter articles, in a good way

Yeah I was thinking "oh crap, sarcastic fringehead is probably not a totally inaccurate description of me, I wonder what it says..."

I mean, it still applies to me even though it is shared with a fish :D

This was a fun article! Thanks OP!

It's a fish. New meaning of clickbait.

It's in the science section of the paper and the article features a picture of the fish on top. I've also never heard the term "Sarcastic Fringehead" use to describe a type of personality and that's the actual name of the fish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcastic_fringehead

Thanks, this saved me from figuring how to bypass their "free article limit".

op made a pun

As in, literally a fish, called the sarcastic fringehead.

Headline is kind of a pun / clickbate.

This is a fabulous "Did they actually read the article?" test.

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