Avoiding ‘False Titles’: How Some News Publications Try Not to Sound Like New Publications

Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in the film adaptation of “The Da Vince Code.” The novel begins with a false title.

A friend wrote to me recently with a question about grammar and style:

In someone else’s holiday house a few days ago I found myself reading The Economist of last week. In a page of brief news notes they referred to:

Goldman Sachs, an investment bank Rolls-Royce, an aircraft-engine maker Airbus, a plane manufacturer Netflix, an online streaming service Novartis, a drugmaker … and Pfizer, another pharma company Alibaba, an e-commerce giant Uber, a ride-hailing firm

And so on and on.

I suppose they are trying to stamp out noun piles (“ride-hailing firm Uber,” etc., etc.) — but for goodness’ sake WHY??? Has any staff member ever read through the page and registered the nannyish effect this rule creates?

What we’re dealing with here is the “false title.” Ben Yagoda wrote about it here last year. Time loves ’em; the AP style book is happy with them; but The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage says: “Do not make titles out of mere descriptions.” That is, they approve “Professor Geoffrey K. Pullum” (“Professor” is a real title), but would not like “former rock musician Geoff Pullum” (even though I did once do that job). However, even the NYT allows exceptions in sports writing (linebacker Ed Scroggett), and my friend’s examples involve corporations rather than people. Is there anything grammatically wrong with “ride-hailing firm Uber”?

I asked Lane Greene, who often writes about language for The Economist. He separated two issues:

One is that we don’t prepose descriptions that result in those big journalese noun piles, for people or entities: “tire-manufacturer Pirelli,” “widget-monger Steve Stevens,” “four-time hog-wrestling champion and three-time hot-dog-eating-contest winner Joe Bloggs.” They go after the noun. It’s part of our style and we like it. “Pirelli, a tire-manufacturer,” “Steve Stevens, a widget-monger.”… The rule is that only true titles can come first: General McChrystal, President Duterte, etc. (What’s a true title? Nobody knows. We have a rule that Chancellor can be one, but not Prime Minister.)

The second issue is what entities (and to a lesser extent people) to identify? We err on the side of identifying most of them, hence “Uber, a ride-hailing service.” We like to try to write the paper so everyone can understand it no matter what kind of base of knowledge they come with. We don’t always hit that target. Our new Finance editor is trying to make her section less forbidding to nonexperts, and I think she’s doing a good job. At that point, though, you risk a style that seems to imply the readers aren’t very knowledgeable.

What percentage of our readers know that when interest rates rise, bond prices fall? We don’t know exactly. We run the risk of overexplaining with open eyes — there’s an in-house joke about “Ford, a carmaker” that serves as a byword for this phenomenon. One workaround is often possible: what Fowler called elegant variation. “Uber is to announce its results. The ride-hailing service has been much-criticized. …” For the knowledgeable reader it just comes across as elegant variation, but the novice gets the needed information.

Phrases like aircraft-engine maker Rolls-Royce must certainly be regarded as grammatical; but they are distinctly journalistic in style, not at all normal in conversation or ordinary expository writing. Paradoxically, then, The New York Times and The Economist are advocating avoidance of a construction that is a typical feature of other newspapers’ prose.

Ben Yagoda’s post quotes my mockery of Dan Brown for using false titles in the opening lines of novels (no less than three of them). “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery” struck me as an utterly weird way to begin The Da Vinci Code, though it would be quite natural in the first sentence of an obituary.

But then Dan Brown don’t need no stinkin’ style guides. As I pointed out in a review of The Lost Symbol in New York Magazine, Dan Brown writes exactly the way writing guides say you shouldn’t. “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs” says The Elements of Style, and Dan slathers his noun phrases with redundant attributive modifiers regardless.

If you’re Dan Brown (he has sold over 200 million books), you can write however you damn well please. But if you write for The Economist, The New York Times, or The Chronicle of Higher Education, you have to respect your publisher’s style decisions.