They're short.
They're attention-grabbing.
They're sometimes cleverly constructed.
They can be silly, funny, dramatic,serious, tragic,punning, alliterative, cruel ...
They're short ... worth mentioning twice I reckon.
There' s lots of ways you can use them. A very simple idea is to just pick a short word at random, and make a headline out of those letters...
If your word was FEAR, and you were doing it in English, you might come up with ..
FEROCIOUS ELEPHANT ATTACKS RIOTERS !
FAMINE ELIMINATES AFRICAN RANCHERS !
FEMALE ATHLETES ALL ROBOTS !
FIRE ENGINES AREN'T RED !
So .. what about doing the same thing but in Welsh ..
FICER EDIFAR AM ROCED !!
FINEGR ENWOG AM RIENI !!!
FRWYDRODD ESGOB AT RWYM !!!!!
I'm not entirely sure I've got all those quite right ... but since when have headline-writers cared about accuracy!
An easy way to get random short words is to turn to page 99 of any book and use the first short words that comes up ... the nearest book to me is George Perec's Les Choses, so if I stick to words with less than 5 letters I would get dans, un , tas , les, le, gout, leur ... and so on.
There's lots of other things you can do with headlines ... and no doubt I will tell you about them at some point... but now it is music time as you all know, and today it's MC Mabon again and Neith y byd i'm para byth ..