You can’t say anybody’s name in the New York Times without the obligatory Mr. and Ms. titles. What’s up with that anyway? Surely the editors who set this policy must have had the sense to foresee they would be reporting on a world with monsters who don’t measure up to the genteel standards of New York’s high society, leading to unintentional bathos and absurdity. But they blithely pretend it doesn’t look… odd. Imagine Uganda 1972…
“Idi Amin is a thoroughly loathesome tyrant with no redeeming graces whatever. Mr. Amin freely admitted to this reporter that he eats roasted babies. However, Mr. Amin stressed that the reports that he stomps kittens are vicious rumors with no basis in fact.”
Or…
“Pol Pot, the reclusive leader of the Khmer Rouge, announced a temporary halt in the mass slaughter of everyone in the country who can read, to allow for more modern, efficient equipment to be installed for the task. Mr. Pot emphasized that the downtime would be kept to a minimum and the death machine would soon be humming better than before. Mr. Pot refused to take questions about the fate of his grandmother, last seen being marched to a death camp.”
The Globe and Mail does so as well; however, it omits it for some personages (former prime ministers, for example, as well as great scientists, artists, dictators, and other notables, who are customarily referred to by their last names alone).
I don’t know, I lost a bit of respect for the Times this past year. I’ve heard before that it sticks to its rule of the “Mr.” shown by referring to Meat Loaf as “Mr. Loaf.” However when Ol’ Dirty Bastard died there were a couple of articles about his work and an obituary. I was disappointed that he was referred to as “O.D.B.” or his given name, rather than “Mr. Bastard.” What good are rules if you’re going to bend them like that?
When Ted Bundy was executed, yes, they refered to him as “Mr. Bundy.”
When the Times ammounced in 1980 (I think) that they would stop using “Miss” or “Mrs.” and start using “Ms,” one woman’s comment was "So I’ll no longer be referred to as Miss Steinman, editor-in-chief of Ms magazine?
Sometimes the NYT makes an exception. After Ted Bundy was dead, they stopped using “Mr.” with his name. The same is true with Jeffrey Dahmer. Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot all lost their titles.
The NYT is very traditionalist in this respect - all other newspapers used to be similar, it’s the NYT which has not changed as much. And American broadsheets have changed less than British ones - the Guardian has perhaps gone furthest. Here’s their Style Guide’s take on capitalisation, which is a good measure of how much a newspaper’s style has changed over time:
and [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,5817,184829,00.html]this
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on Mr/Mrs/etc.:
There’s good reasons to not call Stalin or Lenin ‘Mr’, but that’s not one of them. (Would you refuse to call the soon-to-depart leader of the British opposition “Mr Howard”?)
I am honestly not sure what this means. Are you saying that being a totalitarian dictator removes one’s right to be called “Mr.”? What does this have to do with Mr. Howard? And when did my old high school math teacher become the leader of the British opposition?