My reaction this morning was the same as your wife's. I thought "That's a mighty big headline for a gift of 9 thousand dollars". Of course upon reading the body of the story I found out, as you did, that it was much more. I always thought the standard for million was "MM". Maybe in the interest of time the MRT saved a keystroke and only went with "M".

(And yes, tv people read the newspaper too. I always check the important stuff...obituaries, to see if I'm listed, comics and then the really scary/funny stuff like news out of our nation's Capitol.)

Print journalism has its own rules, that often contradict everything we were taught in school about the mechanics of proper writing.

The headline you cite is poorly crafted, but using the M to indicate "million" is acceptable ... after one has previously written "million." Same B and billion.

In newspapers, space is money so standard forms of abbreviations are shortened even more. Consider A.M. and P.M. In an advertisement it would be correct to use the capital letters and full stops. In the text of an article, the form is a.m. and p.m., and some might even write it without the periods: am and pm. Mr. and Mrs. Eric Siegmund could end up as Mr.&Mrs.Eric Siegmund, or (horrors) M/M Eric Siegmund.

Newspaper writing takes all sorts of liberties with the language and construction that other forms of writing should avoid, and (in my opinion) newspapers should never be relied upon for correct usage. They are a unique form.

Compounding the "problem" is the widespread use of the internet as a resource, so all sorts of differences are creeping into American English usage, with punctuation, abbreviations, and spelling suffering accordingly.

But, my reaction was completely different ..... I saw something that meant ' $9-million ' ..... so did the woman in line behind me, a teacher at MHS .....

The rules that some of you offer as the correct form for the phrase, simply don't apply ..... this is a headline, and headlines have NEVER been about abolutely, thoroughly and excruciatingly correct grammar ... that's for the body of the story, where the rules of the AP Style Manual offer guidleines for the use of million, billion, etc.

What some of you call taking liberties in headlines is often an expression planned-and-crafted to catch your attention, and draw you into the story .....

And, I'm just tickled pink to be sharing comment space here with Darrell and Eric who are, themselves, gifted wordsmiths .....

Isn't there some i before e rule?

Robert, don't go there.

Or is it, "don't go their"?

Or, "thier"?

See, I warned you.

And, along those lines, you'd be amazed – and shocked! – by how many people misspell my last name, rule or no rule.

And here's little ol' me who's never seen or heard of the MM for million.

Strange.

And then there's me, who, even when taking cryptic notes that only I will ever read, insists on using "MM" for million regardless of the rules, for fear of coming back later and not knowing if I meant thousand or million. 8-}

The matter is probably exacerbated* by us computer geeks. When I read the headline as "nine millions", it's because I'm accustomed to thinking of M as "megs". Now, we all know that 1M(eg) is short for "megabytes", which is actually 1,048,576 bytes, but my brain accepts 1M... oops. Circular reference. My brain accepts 1,000,000 for "one meg" in the same way that it, accepts 1K as a sort of civilian reference to 1000, when, in fact, 1K is 1024.** Thus showing the the water is not only muddy, but probably not even potable.

* I had to do something to make myself feel worthy of joining this quibble of linguists (which is, I think, as worthy a collective noun as many others I've seen).
** I'm reluctant to legitimize the earlier claim of the French to "K", because... well, they're French.