Sticks Nix Hick Pix - Fame

Fame

The headline is one of a handful that have entered the lore of journalism, as described in this essay by longtime Associated Press reporter Hugh Mulligan:

Down the years, some of journalism’s most famous headlines have brilliantly suggested what happened and have coaxed the reader to find out more:
  • WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG
  • FORD TO NEW YORK: DROP DEAD
  • HEADLESS TORSO IN TOPLESS BAR
  • HICKS NIX PIX IN STICKS

Mulligan got three of the four headlines wrong, including the "Stix" headline: The 1975 New York Daily News headline was actually "Ford to City: Drop Dead". The April 15, 1983 New York Post headline was: "Headless Body in Topless Bar".

He is one of many who have misquoted the "Stix" headline over the years. It is often misquoted with all four words ending in X. That misspelling appeared in the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which George M. Cohan (played by James Cagney) explains the headline's meaning to several young people, who use it as the basis of an impromptu swing song.

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Famous quotes containing the word fame:

    Fame sometimes hath created something out of nothing. She hath made whole countries more than nature ever did, especially near the poles, and then hath peopled them likewise with inhabitants of her own invention, pigmies, giants, and amazons: yea, fame is sometimes like unto a mushroom, which Pliny recounts to be the greatest miracle in nature, because growing and having no root, as fame no ground of her reports.
    Thomas Fuller (1608–1661)

    It is remarkable that the dead lie everywhere under stones.... Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate,—a stone to a bone? “Here lies,”M”Here lies”;Mwhy do they not sometimes write, There rises? Is it a monument to the body only that is intended?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
    Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)