WE MAY BE AT WAR, but that doesn’t make our president any less polite. During his prime-time press conference on October 11, President Bush made a point of saying that the United States would track down “Mr. bin Laden.” Why the honorific? The other President Bush was never so cordial in speaking about Saddam Hussein. Not only did George H.W. Bush not call him “Mr. Hussein,” he constantly referred to him as “Saddam,” which is a little like you or me calling Henry Kissinger “Hank.” It could be that our president was simply following the curiously formal style of the worlds’ foremost newspaper, the New York Times. The Times has a long-standing policy on honorifics which seeks to give title and bearing to even the least honorious among us. At the paper the legend once circulated that during the ’80s the editors referred to the lead guitarist of Guns N’ Roses as Mr. Slash and the rock singer Meat Loaf as Mr. Loaf. It wasn’t true, but it wasn’t far from truth, so strict was their sense of decorum. Since then, the style mavens at the Times have become a little more lax. According to the New York Times in-house style manual, today children under 18 almost never get an honorific, unless they have a significant “role in the news.” One-name rock stars are no longer given courtesy titles; now it’s just plain Cher and Madonna. Athletes, too, have lost their honorifics, but only when they are being written about in the context of sports: “Omit courtesy titles with most names in sports articles (even on the front page), though titles are sometimes appropriate for names occurring in purely political, civic or business roles . . . In other articles, omit a courtesy title for a sports figure mentioned in an athletic role, but use the title when the name appears in other connections. In an athlete’s obituary, omit the title in passages covering the sport, but use the title in those passages recounting other phases of the subject’s life.” So on that sad day when O.J. Simpson passes on, he will only be “Mr. Simpson” in his obit when the Times recounts the gruesome murder of his wife. The only place where the Times style guide lapses from science to art is in its policy towards famous evil people. Famous good people (Gandhi, Einstein, Jefferson) often lose their honorific and attain Madonna-status after they die, but evil people are a trickier lot. Saddam Hussein is still “Mr. Hussein” at the Times. Likewise Timothy McVeigh, John Wayne Gacy, Slobodan Milosevic, and Idi Amin. It’s a sign of the uprightness of Times editors that they still accord their greatest enemies, Newt Gingrich and Joe McCarthy, their courtesy titles, although it must kill them to do so. But occasionally, when an evil person dies, the Times swoops in and strips them of their honorific. Hitler was once “Mr. Hitler,” as were Stalin and Mao. No more. Among the lesser totalitarian butchers, death cost Pol Pot his Times title: After his obit ran on April 16, 1998 he ceased being “Mr. Pol Pot.” Serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy were demoted as well. So what will become of Mr. bin Laden? It’s tough to say. The style manual is little help here. While he’s holed up in the mountains of Afghanistan he’ll almost certainly keep his honorific, but when the international super-posse finally catches up with him, the editors at the Times will have a difficult decision to make. In the meantime, it’s easy to poke fun at the honorific quirks of the Times (the manual informs editors that courtesy titles for chess and bridge players “should follow the sports style”). As one veteran editor at the Other Times–the Los Angeles Times–told me, “The honorific is old-fashioned, quaint even.” But however infuriating its high-handedness and self-importance are, the Times has a charm which is inescapable. When asked why they would give an honorific to animals such as bin Laden, Bill Borders, a senior editor at the Times, explained, “It’s a matter of our civility, not theirs.” Jonathan V. Last is online editor at The Weekly Standard.
