The Meaning of Headlines: 'kingpins'

The Meaning of Headlines: 'kingpins' - business

The Telegraph displayed the following headline on August 1, 2015 in its news section: ‘The kingpins who get rich from deluge of nuisance calls.’ What does ‘kingpins’ mean?

The article is about the British multi-millionaires who make their fortunes through companies in the telephone sales business. Companies that make ‘cold calls’ have been doing big business. Cold calls are when people (telephone marketers) call telephone numbers at random to sell the person something. These are ‘nuisance’ phone calls because people get a lot of them, day and evening. A parliamentary committee found that about a billion nuisance calls were made in 2014 to the British public. Usually the marketers use aggressive tactics. The people who own these companies hire people to work at a ‘Call Centre’ to make telephone calls. A ‘Call Centre’ is a sales centre with lots of people sitting at desks or in stalls making telephone calls – it’s often a 24-hour business.

One Call Centre company boasted of telephoning 125,000 people a week, which means that 6.5 million people every year were being phoned from a single Call Centre. They sell everything from insurance to fitness products to fertilizer to cheaper electricity for a range of other companies (their customers) – and the companies pay for this marketing service. The owners are the ‘kings of cold calling.’

So what does ‘kingpins’ mean and what has it to do with getting rich? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a ‘kingpin’ as ‘a person who controls an organization or activity’ or ‘a chief person in a group.’ In other words, a kingpin is a CEO, head person, big gun, biggie, big-timer, big wheel, fat cat, and so on.

Why a kingpin? A king is the head of a monarchy. A pin can be a sewing pin or a safety pin that holds material, paper, or other objects together. It’s usually metal. However, there is another kingpin.

A kingpin is terminology used in the sport of ten pin bowling. Bowling has ten pins (or skittles), and the object of the game is to knock the pins down by rolling a heavy ball down a lane in a bowling alley. The kingpin is the pin that stands in the middle of a triangular arrangement of bowling pins. It is surrounded by the other pins – it is protected by the other pins.

Therefore the headline is exposing the people who own or are in charge of Call Centres that make excessive (nuisance) telephone calls to sell goods or services.

But a kingpin in bowling can be knocked down – or bowled over. Can the Call Centre kingpins be knocked down? Apparently yes. The article describes a number of ‘kingpins’ who have been fined for breaching Britain’s communication laws. The article says that ‘as many as 60 companies are being investigated by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for nuisance calls and texts.’ The ICO has not issued many fines, but new laws means that the ICO will be able to fine more companies with larger fines.

Scorecard for The Telegraph headline is 100% for a describing the ‘kings of cold calling’ as kingpins in relation to exposing aggressive telephone sales marketing and the British government that may ‘knock down’ these company owners for breaching communication laws – and annoying the public with nuisance calls.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/11778077/The-kingpins-who-get-rich-from-deluge-of-nuisance-calls.html

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