The words “breaks silence” appear in online headlines with such mechanical regularity that it’s hard to imagine anyone is thinking about their strict meaning. In many cases you would be hard pressed to identify what “silence” was involved or how it was so dramatically shattered.
“Roseanne Barr Breaks Silence on High-Stakes TV Return,” the Hollywood Reporter said this October, as if she were a reticent type who had intended to carry the secret of her new project to the grave. “Tori Spelling Breaks Silence After Temecula Car Crash With Four Kids,” KTLA reported this spring, a week after a normal-sounding road accident. Four days passed between an airplane incident and Page Six’s report that “Selma Blair Breaks Silence on Arrest After Mid-Flight Meltdown.” (It was Blair’s second silence-breaking of the month, after USA Today’s “Selma Blair Breaks Silence on Being ‘Erased’ After Anti-Islam Comment” — though the two years she spent not revisiting that topic really did seem like discretion.) Entertainment Weekly, last month: “Maria Bartiromo Breaks Silence After Shocking Fox News Exit.” She had been communicating about the situation through a lawyer, but now, silence-breakingly, she had posted a photograph of a rainbow on X, thanking everyone for “the outpouring of love.”
“Breaks silence” is especially likely to appear when the underlying story is sensitive or tragic. Tuesday, Oct. 13, was the publication date for a memoir in which Collin Gosselin, son of the reality-TV stars Jon and Kate Gosselin, describes verbal and physical abuse by his mother. The next day, USA Today was running a headline in which Kate “breaks silence” on “explosive memoir claims.” Judging by the article, though, she did not have much silence to break: She’d been discussing the book with social media commenters for months. She denied her estranged son’s allegations, but Collin’s father expressed his support, which InStyle reported using the headline “Jon Gosselin Breaks His Silence on Son Collin’s Explosive Memoir Claims About His Mother Kate.”
There is no particular span of time that does or does not constitute “silence.” About a month passed before TMZ reported that “Carrot Top Breaks Silence After Suicide Attempt,” and there was a similar span between the death of Presley Gerber and the appearance of broken-silence stories about his mother (Cindy Crawford) and sister (Kaia Gerber). Then again, Page Six announced in late October that “Sahara Ray’s Sister Breaks Silence Following Model’s Suspected Overdose Death” — i.e., she posted about her loss on Instagram two days later. If you’re not speaking publicly within 12 hours of a tragedy, some headline somewhere considers you oddly silent.
The Times is not a frequent user of this phrasing, apart from headlines like “English-Language Chinese Newspaper Breaks Silence About Tiananmen Crackdown.” (That was in 2009, meaning the 1989 crackdown had gone unacknowledged for 20 years.) But the words are such a staple that they can easily find their way here too, as they did over the summer: “Karim Khan’s Accuser Breaks Silence on Alleged Sexual Misconduct at I.C.C.”
Silence-breaking, though, is largely for the tabloid press, where the old demands of print headline space meant scandals had to be packed into punchy, sensational, grammatically odd little nuggets. That goes double for Britain, where papers have their own rich slang of “tots” and “boffins” and “love rats,” plus a history of astronomically dense compound nouns like “Amy husband bribery plot landlord.” (That one was spotted by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum; the “Amy” is Winehouse and the rest is a long story.) A former London editor once wrote that people in public relations could learn a lot from such headlines, offering tips like “Make every situation as dramatic as possible” and “Don’t just talk about a problem — describe a crisis.”
Some of the bombastic language this cultivates is delightful. People “ax” and “bash” and “blast” things. Everything is a “bombshell” or a “flop.” (Recently, from Express: “Prince Harry Breaks Silence on Royal Family Feud With Brutal Dig in Bombshell Interview.”) Maybe you can’t prove that two people had a “tryst,” but they were definitely “canoodling.” Things rapidly become unfair: A celebrity’s mild agitation becomes a “meltdown,” and even the gentlest criticism becomes a “slam.” But this overstatement is easy enough to discount. It’s what the writer Otto Friedrich called “the art of exaggerating without actually lying,” and you expect it going in: The crisis in the headline indicates that there is just enough of a real problem to avoid litigation.
This is the drama-heightening purpose that “breaks silence” wants to serve. It makes an ordinary social media post sound like a long-awaited confession regarding the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa.
And yet something about the phrase feels far uglier than any of its tabloid peers. Consider this, from Entertainment Weekly: “Chad Lowe’s Daughter, Mabel, Breaks Silence on the Death of Her Sister, Fiona.” This headline, and a similar one from Page Six, appeared on Oct. 3 — four days after the actor Chad Lowe’s family released a statement announcing the death of 13-year-old Fiona. In the short time between that statement of grief and 17-year-old Mabel’s silence-shattering Instagram post about loving her sister, you might imagine she talked plenty with family, friends, perhaps a therapist — any number of people with whom it’s more appropriate for a teenager to process loss than the national entertainment press — and did other things that are profoundly none of our business. Why is this “breaking silence?”
One answer might be false sensitivity — the implication that the press respects everyone’s privacy until they relinquish it of their own accord. But all of the phrase’s other implications point in the exact opposite direction. “Breaks silence” sounds as if somebody has been willfully withholding comment, or holing up, tragic and vulnerable, incapable of facing us. The words are like the enforcement mechanism for a bullying, corrosive, one-sided contract: You are on our stage, facing our audience, and we will consider it newsworthy for you to go quietly about your business as if this were not the case. Normal behavior means participating fully and always in public chatter. To do otherwise is “silence.” Even for just a few days, and maybe even if you are a teenager mourning your little sister.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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