Untruncating

Facebook notifications often show an abbreviated version of some of the text that they’re about. In particular, notifications about shared links show an abbreviated version of the linked-to piece’s headline/title, with an ellipsis at the end.

Which sometimes makes me want to complete the truncated title. Which can have entertaining results.

I’ve been meaning for a while to post here about the un-truncating-titles game. But often, the article turns out to be about a very serious or upsetting issue, so I don’t want to make jokes about it.

But this morning I came across a headline that’s non-serious enough and open-ended enough to use as an example. The Facebook notification showed the article title like this:

New Zealand birds show humanlike…

So I invite you to complete that headline.

I also invite you to post other automatically truncated headlines, and your suggestions for untruncating them. But best to avoid headlines that were originally about traumatic or contentious situations.

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