From Zeroo to Heroo: Word Play and Wayne Rooney in the British Press
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2005 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Slovak Studies in English I. The Proceedings of the conference organized on the occcasion of the 80th anniversary of the opening of British and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Comenius University, Bratislava |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | word play; Roo-morpheme; punning; allusion; headlines; semiotic play; media language; discourse analysis; visual communication in media; multimodality; Wayne Rooney |
| Description | One of the topics which received much attention in the British media in 2004 was the appearance of a new football star at the Euro 2004 Championship in Portugal: Wayne Rooney. As the 18-year-old player was catapulted, to paraphrase one of the headlines, from "zero" to "hero" almost overnight, the media had to find ways of turning the little known teenager into a household name. One of the strategies adopted by the popular press was to appropriate Rooney by using nicknames and by transforming many common nouns to include references to him, the latter achieved by using the affix Roo to form countless blends. In this way, he turned "heroo" from a "zeroo". This article documents some of the forms of reference which were used in the British popular press (mainly the Sun and the Daily Mirror newspapers) in connection with Wayne Rooney. Such forms of reference are placed within the framework of word-play: a creative manipulation of linguistic forms. |