The sacred script banning the I word has been trashed and the Me Generation, the I Specialists and the Lived Experience Battalion all have got hold of headlines to a laughable and astoundingly dull degree.

Allow me a pedantic grumble. I collect headlines and publish the ones I find admirable, intriguing or spectacularly awful every year in Daily Maverick. 2025's collection can be found here.

Headlines matter. Without them, written media content would be an unnavigable mess of potage. We would have no clear way of deciphering what to choose to read. They are like menus in restaurants or book covers. They tempt or repel or bore, and, done well, they guide us through the media maze and make decisions for us.

Sadly, the wisdom and skill of the great headline is a dying art. The keepers of the flame were crusty subeditors with a gift for brevity and an eye for wordplay. They have been culled in cost-cutting to the point of extinction, and, in their place, time-short, multipurpose media staff deliver functional afterthoughts or ask the writer to provide the headline.

And I can live with that as long as certain obvious fundamental rules are still applied. One of which is cast in stone and inked in blood: Never begin a headline (or a column for that matter) with the word "I". That would be evidence of something "outright barbarous", to quote...