Skip to main content

A matter of style


just found something in the Guardian's style guide that had never before occurred to me.

The entry on the use of the names of people quoted refers to the situation in which it is thought necessary, in a news report, to introduce someone to ones readers with a description beyond the name.

In a story about a football [soccer!] game, one might write, "Paul Heckingbottom, the Sheffield United manager, said...." 

Why the commas, though? Here is the interesting bit. Why not just "Paul Heckingbottom the Sheffield United manager said..."? 

TIL that commas around the name indicate that there is only one person with this function. If the team were managed by committee, and each member of the committee had the title "manager," then one might well write "Paul Heckingbottom the Sheffield United manager said...."

More plausibly, and shifting to political coverage, "The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said" is proper. But there are a lot of former Labour leaders knocking about, so one would say, "the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock said...."

Good to know.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryJuly 20, 2023 at 5:49 AM

    This is a matter of convention. I believe that the convention is, "Paul Heckingbottom, the Sheffield United manager, said..." and "Sheffield United Manager Paul Heckingbottom said..." I've never seen that one drops the commas if more than one person has the function. In that case, it would be accurate to say, "Paul Heckingbottom, a Sheffield United manager, said..."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
1 comment
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...
Post a Comment
Read more