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I have read (by accident, I'm sorry) a short news article that had the following headline:

Debussy, but EPIC for the new Godzilla trailer

The article text for this was as followed:

Godzilla 2: King of the Monsters continues the trend of making classical music EPIC by turning Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" into a spine-tingling blast of EPICness.

Is this a "correct" or widely understood way to form a headline in english? What kind of construct is this? A noun followed by ", but [adverb] ..."? What is this supposed to express?

bitbonk
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  • Try mentally adding the words “it is” before Debussy and epic in the headline. That’s what it is expressing. – Lawrence Jul 26 '18 at 13:41
  • but why "but"? :) – bitbonk Jul 26 '18 at 13:42
  • I suppose they didn’t consider Debussy particularly epic in its normal context. – Lawrence Jul 26 '18 at 13:43
  • so it is "Debussy is not really epic, but it is epic for the new Godzilla trailer." ? – bitbonk Jul 26 '18 at 13:44
  • But draws contrast. Maybe the person thought one was music that makes people relax, while the other was a show that makes people go, “Wow!” – Lawrence Jul 26 '18 at 13:53
  • Wait... are you concerned about the grammar (dropping normally required words) or about the aesthetics of applying the adjective 'epic' to certain kinds of music? – Mitch Jul 26 '18 at 13:58
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    It's fine grammatically but yeah it's utterly horrible in all the other ways. I have no idea why anyone would write like that, and more to the point, I have no idea why you'd read such trash. – RegDwigнt Jul 26 '18 at 14:04
  • And I can't find it on knowyourmeme, but the actual answer to your question is, "X but it's Y" is a meme. That is all. YouTube is full of it to the brim right now. But it's going out of style already. – RegDwigнt Jul 26 '18 at 14:10
  • @Mitch I am concerned about the grammatical correctness, is correct to drop words like this in a headline or at least a very commonly used style in English speaking journalism. If this is correct can you cite or explain the rules? – bitbonk Jul 26 '18 at 19:34
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    Read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlinese – John Feltz Jul 26 '18 at 19:47
  • @JohnFeltz Actually I am more or less aware of everything described in that Wikipedia article but the above headline can’t really be explained with that wiki article. A noun/name standing alone followed by a comma, I haven‘t seen this before. – bitbonk Jul 26 '18 at 19:55
  • Headlines have conflicting interests: Taking up limited space while drawing the reader into reading the article that follows. To that end, quick & sexy often tops graceful. – Yosef Baskin Jan 29 '20 at 19:09

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