Plato, Elvis, Boudicca, Geronimo and Adele are mononyms, that is, people who are famous enough to be known and addressed by a single name, usually their first. Philip Downer, from Teddington, thinks we’ve been trying to add another to the pantheon, and he doesn’t approve.
“I was pleased to see,” he wrote, “that in your big Saturday interview the Mayor of London was referred to as ‘Mr Johnson’ throughout. However, The Times often, in news stories, headlines and opinion pieces, refers to him simply as ‘Boris’. Jenni Russell’s otherwise excellent piece last Thursday talked of ‘Boris’ and ‘Cameron’ in the same sentence. This is absurd.”
Johnson, Mr Downer says, is a common name, “but Cameron, Osborne, May or Hammond are hardly exotic, and we very rarely see them referred to in matey first-name terms. Mr Johnson aspires to lead the Conservative party, and appears to be prepared to use every political trick to achieve his ambition. He isn’t cuddly or somehow ‘different’. Please drop the ‘Boris’ and refer to him in the same, even-handed way that you would any other politician, of any stripe.”
The prime minister has, on occasion, appeared in our parliamentary sketches as “Dave”, but I can’t recall the home secretary being referred to as “Theresa”. Perish the thought. Our sketchwriter — and diary editor — Patrick Kidd says: “Boris is more of a brand than a politician, and so being known by just one name is as much part of the schtick as the messy hair and classical references. I tend to call him BoJo in the diary, which not only takes the brand a step forward but makes him sound like a clown.”
Only a very few politicians are known by their first names, Patrick points out: “Winston, Maggie, Enoch, maybe Ted or, gulp, Nigel.” Being called “Maggie” never made Thatcher sound cuddly, and once Jenni Russell had finished with Boris that’s not how he came across either.
Advertisement
The Saturday interview to which Mr Downer referred appears in the news pages, and comes under the style guide’s rules for news reports. These ordain that almost every adult surname gets a title. “Give the name in full at first mention, then refer to Mr, Mrs, Ms. There may be occasions when it is more appropriate at second mention to use just a first name (Bob, Sue, etc). Such occasions will be rare; they require justification and careful thought.”
Headlines are different. “Boris” is instantly recognisable — and short — a gift to headline writers. As for the news reports themselves, while first names on their own are rare, surname-only references are more common than they used to be. For the sake of consistency, we’ve extended the convention operating in features and sport sections to dispense with Mr/Mrs/Ms, etc, for sportsmen, artists, authors, film stars, pop stars and so on, to the news pages as well.
This can occasionally raise hackles, especially where people of a traditional bent perceive some sort of disrespect towards women. I wrote about this when Cilla Black died and there was a flurry of protest over our referring to her as “Black”. On reflection, we should probably have just called her “Cilla”, style guide or not. If she doesn’t qualify as a mononym, I don’t know who does.
Weather or not
Joseph Reynolds is having trouble with the terminology of weather forecasting.
Advertisement
“As an American,” he writes from Wiveliscombe, Somerset, “I am often amused by consistently inconsistent weather predictions — dry, sunny, windy, isolated shower, wintry, some torrential downfalls, maybe snow or hurricane, who knows? But I was befuddled by the following for SW Eng (Feb 27): ‘A largely dry and bright day over most areas, with some sunny spells.’ Where I come from ‘bright’ actually means ‘sunny’. Is ‘bright’ over here just an optimistic spin on ‘daytime’?”
Well spotted, Mr Reynolds. I’m sure that’s what it is. When I was a teenager our family holidays in west Wales followed an infallible routine — my mother peering through the window at the sheeting rain and announcing: “It’s getting brighter.” It was the only time we knew her to tell a bare-faced lie.
Elizabeth Bouttell made a similar point in her recent email about “fair”. “Your weather for midday yesterday in Rome was given as 8 degrees and F (fair). We were standing in St Peter’s Square at 1200 listening to the Pope’s address. Eight degrees it may have been but the sky was a wonderful blue and there was not a cloud to be seen anywhere.”
Pixie pilots
Dr LV Morrison’s observations about nicknames for vertically challenged pilots, which I quoted last week, prompted several emails, among them this one from Richard Wafer in Vancouver.
Advertisement
“I know nothing about recruitment for the RAF (my dad was army at Juno beach on D-Day — Royal Signals, but attached to the Winnipeg Rifles), but the grandfather of one of my sons-in-law was an American WWII pilot, and was about the same size as Mickey Rooney. Not surprisingly, he was known to his friends as ‘Shorty’, and he told me that the USAF preferred short pilots due to space and weight restrictions in their fighter planes — a bit like jockeys, I guess.”
And from Ardingly, West Sussex, David Lynd wrote: “The ‘diminutive’ Dr Morrison can take heart: a colleague of my father’s in the Royal Navy was always known as ‘Pew’. As in Blind Pew — he wore glasses.”