This Week in the Mercury
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Media / Sports No More Mr. Professional Athlete
Posted by Bethany Jean Clement on Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:29 AM
...or Ms. Professional Athlete, either, at the Wall Street Journal:
Starting this week in The Journal, you will no longer see athletes called "Mr." or "Ms." The paper is reversing its stately, conspicuous tradition of using "honorific" courtesy titles in its sports coverage, entering a dizzy modern age of forward passes, shot clocks, Colin Cowherd sitcoms and jocks being referred to solely by their last name...The new policy won't affect other sections of The Journal. Mark Zuckerberg remains Mr. Zuckerberg in subsequent references; Oprah Winfrey stays Ms. Winfrey...
Honorifics can be tricky in sportswriting. Nearly everyone who covers the subject here can remember a sentence made funky by the inclusion of Mr. or Ms. A simple play could wind up resembling the minutes of the world's craziest deposition, like this description of a game-sealing touchdown in the New York Jets' playoff upset of the New England Patriots: "Mr. Ryan…lumbered down the sideline to hug Mr. Greene, at which point Mr. Sanchez jumped on Mr. Ryan's back."
A web survey showed that most WSJ readers (online, anyway—and they'd be the less creaky ones) wanted to keep the honorifics. Too bad for the majority.
Maybe this is a New Coke moment. Maybe The Journal has whipped itself into a modish frenzy and will grow melancholy about the missing honorifics. Maybe a few months from now, we'll reverse course and go back to describing double plays of Mr. Cano to Mr. Jeter to Mr. Teixeira.Probably not. Whether it's instant replay or wild-card playoffs, sports usually modernizes and moves on. This is not some Bill Veeck-ian gimmick. This is what almost everyone does. We were a final holdout.
Which begs the question, Wall Street Journal: If Mr. and Ms. Everyone was going to jump off a bridge, would you?
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