The Guardian Opinion headline, "Why are young people all growing mullets? I’ve been inspired by a much better hairstyle," joins a noxious trend of using a universal quantifier -- "all" or "every," for example -- to refer to a subset that is actually a minority.
It's sloppy and unprofessional. And it's a lie.
The percentage of "young people" "growing mullets" is in fact a minority. The trend may or may not be growing. But even "most" is a lie. "All" is a ridiculous and obvious lie.
Pointing this out pegs me as a stuffy scold. After all, the piece is frivolous, the topic irrelevant.
But I fear the motivation for such flabby language is that in today's media landscape, professional media competes with social media in the global contest for eyeballs. And so professional media feels the need to loosen standards, dumb down language and lie casually to compete with the everyday speech patterns of people who aren't expected to use dictionaries or adhere to AP style.
And what is gained? The headline, "Why are young people growing mullets?" serves the headline's purpose perfectly. The addition of "all" does nothing more than to colloquialize -- a deliberate and lazy lie designed to be relatable to a public that deliberately and casually lies in everyday speech.
I don't know when legitimate news publications started doing this. But now they all do it.
See how wrong that is?