Newspaper Clipping: This headline doesn’t sound right to me. To you?

This headline, above a story re ongoing climate change talks in Copenhagen, appeared in the local Free Press on Dec. 8th:

Talks spurn new hope of change

‘Spurn’ means repel, thrust back, or reject (i.e., to spurn a lover by dating her sister - a really bad, bad thing to do).

To spurn hope for change would be a terrible thing to do at climate change talks. Why would anyone attend if that was the case?

So, I think spurn must be the wrong word (spur was the likely choice, and was simply misspelled), especially after reading the first paragraph:

“The biggest climate talks in history opened in Copenhagen, Denmark, yesterday with renewed hope of reaching a deal that will replace the existing Koyoto Protocol, and with warnings that failure would be a death blow to our planet.”

[Click here to read full article]

Wait a minute.

Deeper into the article I read:

“World leaders -- including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U. S. President Barack Obama -- plan to attend only in the last few days to make any major decisions.”


Maybe spurn is the right choice, because the Canadian Prime Minister is only going to go to drop the bad news that he can’t make any significant changes to carbon emissions because the Canadian economy is joined at the hip to the American economy and he can only do what President Obama will do or else he’d suffer the wrath of just about every oil man in Alberta.

And Harper wouldn’t want to suffer wrath. He’d rather show no leadership at the climate change talks.

So, spurn may be the right word after all.

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