What’s Boho?

In yesterday’s Honolulu Sunday Star-Advertiser, right there, smack dab on the front of Travel Section page B-1, was this layout (Click on it to enlarge):

 

Being a headline reader, I read the headline first, gazing downward on the left side, I read the head: ”BEACH MEETS BOHO AT BYRON BAY.” Okay, that did it, I just had to read the rest of the story to find out what “boho” meant.

My first scan of the story resulted in … nothing. That ticked me off; I invested a lot of my time reading to educate myself and what? Nothing. So I read the story a second time, and this time discovered the phrase “boho backpacking” (see the insert in the upper right-hand corner of the picture).

Nothing in the story explained what the hell “boho” meant. Was it a shortened version of “blow hole”? Did it mean a hiker was crying out loud, as in bo(o) ho(o)? What? What? I had to find the word online.

“Boho,” it turns out, is an adjective that means “socially unconventional.” It draws on bohemian and hippie influences.

See? I had to look it up. A person reading a headline should not have to look up a word. That’s bad headline writing. Worse yet, when the word isn’t explained in the story, the writer is assuming the reader is familiar with such esoteric terms. That’s bad writing.

Bad headline writing at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and bad story writing from the New York Times. But it’s also bad editing on the part of the Star-Advertiser. The editor should have read the story carefully before laying it out, and made a parenthetical explanation of the term – do something like this … “boho (stylishly bohemian) backpacking.”

Now how hard is that? It makes one’s mind boho-boggle.