For Christmas this year, my mother-in-law gave me a sweatshirt with the words, “I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you.” Emboldened by this slogan, I have decided to address a festering issue. Ever since September, I have been puzzled by an editorial stance taken by the Insiders, and reading the gift wrap issue (and I did use it!) last week and the Monitor this Boxing Day morning, I see the need to revisit the problem in hopes that they will consider adopting a New Year’s Resolution.
Back in September, I noted that the Insider had erred in “not italicizing the names of magazines,” and was answered thus: “The Insiders would like to state, for the record, that italicizing titles seems sort of uppity, so we’ve opted to simply place them in quotes or, when referring to the Monitor or Insider, not do anything at all.”
Now, this stance really makes no more sense than announcing that you consider upper case elitist and are going to start writing “barak obama” and “st. paul’s school” and that you’re going to take out all the capital letters in the ads that businesses submit so that they refer to constantly pizza and seams to fit and bayberry barn.
Every book on usage that I have read in my lifetime tells me that most titles should be underlined if handwritten or typed and set in italics if printed. That’s true for books (The Given Day), magazines (Newsweek), newspapers (the Concord Monitor), pamphlets (Common Sense), long poems (Paradise Lost), plays (Hamlet), movies (Enchanted), TV shows (The Wire), painting and sculptures (Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, Rodin’s The Kiss), comic strips (For Better or Worse) musical compositions with names (Dindy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air), and what used to be called record albums (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). The titles of shorter items (short stories, essays, inpidual songs, short poems) which can be put inside bigger things are in quotation marks.
But the Insider has its own policy and wants to go its own way. Hence it refers to Donald Tuttle’s booklet as “The New Hampshire Troubadour” and then as The Troubador instead of calling it The New Hampshire Troubadour and The Troubadour, and it references the obituary on Mr. Tuttle in the New York Times instead of the New York Times. In Tommy Symmes’ letter from Germany, it lets Silent Night slip by instead of changing it to “Silent Night.”
To see how to do it right, the Insiders only have to read last Friday’s Monitor. There, in a sidebar in Section D, the titles of video games are printed as Fallout 3, Fable II, and Lost Odyssey. The movies reviewed are Revolutionary Road, Marley & Me, Valkyrie, Doubt, Bedtime Stories, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which, as an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, was “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”) A profile of Charles Ponzi in Section A uses the definition of a Ponzi scheme found in the Oxford English Dictionary and quotes from a biography entitled Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend. An article on the death of VHS mentions America’s Next Top Model.
There is, in short, a right way and a wrong way. We italicize titles because that’s what we do. Sometimes it is even necessary. (“I’ve been reading John Adams recently” is not the same as “I’ve been reading John Adams lately.”) It’s time for the Insiders to abandon their “uppity” position and do it the right way in 2009.
The Grammarnator
