Ask LLOG: "(The) OCCUPATION NAME"?
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From Coby L:
I wonder if you can refer me to a discussion of the appropriateness of the very common omission of "the" when a person's name is preceded by their position or occupation and is not a title or rank (like Professor, Colonel or President). For example, linguist Mark Liberman, writer Stephen King and the like. (In The New Yorker it would almost certainly be "the linguist" etc.)
As regards titles, specifically relating to political positions and used as forms of address, the I have also wondered why some are usually preceded by Mr. or Madam (President, Speaker…) and others are not (Governor, Senator, Prime Minister…). Any insights?
I've got some thoughts and references, but I'll leave this for readers to answer first…
Anubis said,
March 19, 2026 @ 10:02 am
Dropping "the" is probably mostly randomly acceptable either way. The nuance seems to me that putting "the" in front emphasizes (or essentializes) a the role, with mention of who is playing it at the moment – the linguist, Mark Liberman. Dropping the "the" emphasizes a person, who happens, relevantly to play a particular role – linguist Mark Liberman. It's not a distinction we would usually both making probably.
anubis said,
March 19, 2026 @ 10:04 am
correction . . . "not a distinction we would bother making probably."
Andrew Taylor said,
March 19, 2026 @ 10:43 am
Dropping the definite article is a feature of the style of renowned author Dan Brown:
https://jimmyakin.com/2024/03/dont-make-fun-of-renowned-dan-brown.html
ktschwarz said,
March 19, 2026 @ 10:56 am
And that analysis of renowned author Dan Brown originated at Language Log in 2004.
Julian Hook said,
March 19, 2026 @ 11:23 am
To my ear, "the linguist Mark Liberman" seems to suggest that readers likely already know that Mark Liberman is a linguist, akin to "Mark Liberman, the well-known linguist." On the other hand, "linguist Mark Liberman" (without "the") makes no such assumption, serving perhaps as a shorter way of saying "Mark Liberman, who is a linguist."
By the way, Anubis, in the comment above, adds a comma: "the linguist, Mark Liberman." I'm pretty sure The New Yorker School of Commas would not sanction that comma unless Mark Liberman were the only linguist in the world, or more likely the only one who has been previously mentioned. If "the linguist" could refer to more than one person, they would omit the comma: the linguist Mark Liberman, not to be confused with the linguist Geoffrey Pullum.
David Marjanović said,
March 19, 2026 @ 11:35 am
Omitting "the" started over half a century ago and probably comes from newspaper captions (and headlines).
Fascinating. Wouldn't have occurred to me.
Correct.
That's a bit of a head-scratcher. In German and French, all of them are preceded (they replace the name, not the address); in Chinese, none of them are.
CuConnacht said,
March 19, 2026 @ 12:26 pm
I have the feeling that Time Magazine started dropping the article as part of its house style when it first started, 1923. A style that also included a lot of inversions of the type parodied by Wolcott Gibbs: "Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind."
David L said,
March 19, 2026 @ 12:31 pm
I agree with Julian Hook. In my editing experience, a first mention of someone in a story would be "Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania" or "University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman." In a subsequent mention, if it's a long story, you might say "linguist (Mark) Liberman," in case you think the reader might have forgotten who he is.
In a less formal context, you might write "linguist Mark Liberman" without mentioning any institution; this would not be standard in print journalism or in most online journalism with any pretensions of authority.
The New Yorker style of writing "the linguist Mark Liberman," without further elaboration, implies to me, as Julian Hook says, that the reader is supposed to know who this person is. "The writer Stephen King" works because it's reasonable to assume all New Yorker readers know who Stephen King is — something which cannot be said, I'm sorry to say, of Prof. Liberman. Of course, you might also simply say "Stephen King," if it's clear from the context which Stephen King we are talking about.
CuConnacht said,
March 19, 2026 @ 12:33 pm
I forgot the end of the Gibbs quote "Where it will all end, knows God!" I was reminded of it by the Wikipedia article on Time, which led me to their article on "false titles" (“convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh") which they do suggest were popularized by Time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_title
Time used to capitalize them: "Ruskin's famed friend, Painter Sir John Millais."
Philip Taylor said,
March 19, 2026 @ 1:25 pm
Re. "false titles", I don't think I have read (or heard) anything during the last year or so concerning the late Jeffrey Epstein which did not prefix his name with "convicted pædophile" or similar …
David Morris said,
March 19, 2026 @ 2:16 pm
Some occupations fit this pattern better than others. Referring to me as 'the publishing editor David Morris' sounds strange, but it may be necessary to distinguish me from the surgeon David Morris and the lawyer David Morris (who I know of here in Sydney).
VVOV said,
March 19, 2026 @ 2:22 pm
This "anarthrous noun phrase" preceding a person's name has indeed been discussed before, but to summarize what I think are the key observations here:
"Linguist Mark Liberman said…" = connotes a particular "journalese" register (hence why some publications aiming for a more highbrow style, such as the NYT and New Yorker, ban this construction in their style guides.)
"The linguist Mark Liberman said…" = carries some implication that the person is well-known, a public figure, etc. for having the role described in the noun phrase. (Surely "the undergraduate student Bob Smith said…", if e.g. introducing a quote from a random participant in one of Prof. Liberman's classes, sounds inapt.)
A neutral alternative conveying neither the "journalese register" nor the "notable public figure" implications requires rewording, like "Mark Liberman, a linguist, said…"
Y said,
March 19, 2026 @ 3:12 pm
Not when opening a sentence, but particularly following a preposition: "According to linguist Mark Liberman…" It doesn't work with some professions: "According to farmer Mark Liberman" would be dispreferred to "According to Mark Liberman, a farmer,…"
J.W. Brewer said,
March 19, 2026 @ 5:48 pm
I found a transcript of a news conference from a few years ago in which the then-president of the U.S. was meeting with the then-president of another country, who alternated between addressing our guy as "Mr. President" and as "President Biden." Which seemed fine – I think those two possibilities are mutually exclusive, though.
Addressing the governor of a U.S. state as "Mr. Governor" as an alternative to "Governor SURNAME" sounds a bit odd/marked, but you can find it. I just googled up the transcript of a 1948 press conference in Michigan where others are addressing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Sigler that way, for example. And there's a current "tv series" (meaning it's floating around the internet somewhere" titled Mr. Governor, Let Go of Our Baby. (Premise: "A gubernatorial frontrunner reunites with his former love, unaware she's raising their child. As past deceptions surface, old feelings reignite, proving their connection never truly faded.")
Michael Sullivan said,
March 19, 2026 @ 11:52 pm
To my mind, "the linguist X" puts emphasis on the fact that we're talking about some linguist who happens to be X, while "linguist X" says we're talking about X, who is a linguist. Yet a different sense is reflected by "the linguist, X," where the focus is on the fact that X is a linguist.
Philip Taylor said,
March 20, 2026 @ 3:11 am
But if one were to prefix "farmer" with a location (e.g., "According to fells farmer Mark Liberman, …", that would sound fine to my British ear.
Andreas Johansson said,
March 20, 2026 @ 3:31 am
Why, anyway, is this different from royal or noble titles? No-one AFAIK would say "the king Charles" and "the lord Soandso" sounds vaguely archaic to me.
(Oddly, if my intuition is right, "emperor" goes with "lord" rather than "king" here.)
ajay said,
March 20, 2026 @ 5:13 am
I have also wondered why some are usually preceded by Mr. or Madam (President, Speaker…) and others are not (Governor, Senator, Prime Minister…).
Naval ranks had this, though there was in that case a clear explanation. Warrant officers were addressed as Mr Smith; commissioned officers by their rank and surname – Lieutenant Smith, Captain Smith and so on. Midshipmen didn't hold a commission or a warrant, but were addressed as "Mr Midshipman Smith" just to make it clear that they were trainee officers in positions of authority, but not warrant officers.
FM said,
March 20, 2026 @ 7:31 am
You may find a few elements in the following article (in French):
https://journals.openedition.org/corela/15090#tocto3n7
Long story short: these bare nominals are not analysed as autonomous referential noun phrases but rather as modifiers of the proper noun (hence ‘linguist Mark Liberman / Mark Liberman / *linguist writes on Language Log’). With ‘the’ however they are fully-fledged, autonomous, referential noun phrases functioning in apposition to the noun phrase.
Tom said,
March 20, 2026 @ 1:01 pm
I think dropping "the" only works because it makes the noun-modifier reminiscent of a title. Compare "linguist Mark Liberman said…" to "statue Liberty stands…". Nobody would write the second phrase because statue does not sound like a title the way professor or linguist can.
When we use a possessive, it is almost always in the case of identifying one of a small group, and this is the case with the definite article used in front of an adjective too. "My red car" means I have multiple, and "the red car" means there is more than one in question. "A red car" means simply one of the many cars in existence that happened to be colored red. With adjectives, the article or possessive points to the noun.
This is not the case with noun modifiers. With noun modifiers, the comma tells us which noun the definite article or possessive is pointing to. If I have 2 brothers, I should write "my brother Mark" unless I have identified and referred to him multiple times, in which case I can write "my brother, Mark" even if I have another brother. Without the comma, "my" is actually pointing to "Mark" which is modified by brother. With the comma, "my" is pointing to "brother". This is why "a brother, Mark" could be okay but "a brother Mark" almost never if ever–the indefinite article would be pointing to Mark.
(Tangent: it's funny to imagine a British navy with only one ship. It would rightly be called, e.g., "H.M.S., Endeavor".)
When we write "the linguist Mark Liberman", the definite article is pointing to Mark Liberman and linguist just modifying Mark Liberman. "A linguist Mark Liberman" is almost senseless as above, as any "a Mark" construction would be.
However, the noun-modifier construction plays a trick on us. When we read "the red", we expect a following noun like "car" to make sense of the phrase. Thus the definite article always sounds like it's pointing to the word after the modifer. When we read "the linguist", no such noun is needed (even though present) to create a sensible phrase. So although we can parse "the linguist Mark Liberman" and know what it means to mean, the definite article followed by the modifying noun sounds like a construction telling us there is only one linguist. Obviously, we ought to know him/her!!
I would prefer to see more "a linguist, Mark Liberman", which is perfectly sensible and, I think, more correct, meaning "one linguist of the many linguists and whose name is Mark…". The construction "linguist Mark… " sounds like the same thing because we know "Dr. Mark" means there are many doctors, but as mentioned above, it is ungrammatical.
Ed Rorie said,
March 20, 2026 @ 1:31 pm
From the opening page of Raymond Chandler’s novel “Playback”; Philip Marlowe has just answered the telephone:
[Caller]: "Did you hear me? I said I was Clyde Umney, the lawyer."
[Marlowe]: "Clyde Umney, the lawyer. I thought we had several of them."
Philip Taylor said,
March 21, 2026 @ 4:08 am
« it's funny to imagine a British navy with only one ship. It would rightly be called, e.g., "H.M.S., Endeavor" » — no, it would be called "H.M.S., Endeavour". We Britons do insist on spelling things properly, don't you know ?
David Marjanović said,
March 21, 2026 @ 6:10 am
It seems that in the New York Times he's mostly "the disgraced financier".
Jamie said,
March 21, 2026 @ 6:19 am
Ed Rorie;
Excellent!
I'd thought of the Erle Stanley Gardner books where Perry Mason frequently introduces or identifies himself, in person or on the phone, by saying, "I'm Perry Mason, the lawyer," or "I'm Perry Mason, a lawyer."
Both seem very dated, but to me the first sounds presumptuous, as if he knows he's famous enough that his interlocutor has a mental 'lawyer Perry Mason' file ready to be accessed (but not so famous that he doesn't have to add the lawyer bit).
Philip Taylor said,
March 21, 2026 @ 7:28 am
Fascinating, David — I can only assume that the British are thought to be more interested in society's sexual mores than they are in financial irregularities …
Rodger C said,
March 21, 2026 @ 9:55 am
Philip, I think the difference is that in America we're shy of being explicit about sexual matters; hence "the, um, you know, disgraced financier."
Philip Taylor said,
March 21, 2026 @ 10:23 am
Oh, I see …
Mai Kuha said,
March 21, 2026 @ 12:37 pm
Somewhat related to what David Morris and Tom have said here, my intuition is that, in speech, the occupation name can take contrastive stress only after "the", not when "the" is absent.
JPL said,
March 21, 2026 @ 4:05 pm
@David Marjanovich:
Interesting. How about "paedophilic blackmailer" as a summary description of what he was in the world? (Calling him "financier" strikes me as off the mark. Sort of like calling an organized crime outfit a "cement-mixing company". I realize that puts "blackmailer" over "sex trafficker" in importance, but I am hypothesizing that that's where most of the big money was coming from.)
KevinM said,
March 22, 2026 @ 2:32 pm
Most famously, the coined title is an element of Time magazine style. However awkward, it does serve the goal of compression.
"A false, coined, fake, bogus or pseudo-title, also called a Time-style adjective and an anarthrous nominal premodifier, is a kind of preposed appositive phrase before a noun predominantly found in journalistic writing. It formally resembles a title, in that it does not start with an article, but is a common noun phrase, not a title. An example is the phrase convicted bomber in "convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh", rather than "the convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_title#:~:text=A%20false%2C%20coined%2C%20fake%2C,British%20websites%20in%20recent%20years. (citing Garner, Bryan A. (2003), Garner's Modern American Usage, USA: Oxford University Press, pp. 789, ISBN 0-19-516191-2)
Bob said,
March 23, 2026 @ 12:18 pm
English-speaking Muslims regularly omit "the" before the title prophet: they say "Prophet Mohammad", "Prophet Joseph", "Prophet Jesus", etc. This strikes my ears as wrong, but it is their convention. I don't know where it comes from; not Arabic, certainly. Maybe a South Asian language?
The Ngram viewer shows that until about 1950 nearly all occurrances of "prophet Mohammad" included "the", but since then an increasing proportion of "prophet Mohammad"s appear without "the". (I haven't tried other spellings of the prophet's name.)
ajay said,
March 26, 2026 @ 5:06 am
I came across an interesting anarthrous modifier in the paper today – "evil".
"Evil Archibald Hunter, 77, died in custody…" (he was in prison for murder). This is a newspaper-ism and specifically a tabloid one, I would say.
J.W. Brewer said,
March 26, 2026 @ 1:56 pm
@ajay: The great Australian pedal steel guitarist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Lee_(musician) is sometimes known as "Evil Graham Lee" or at least "'Evil' Graham Lee." The usual story is that his quondam bandmate the late David McComb thought Graham should have a cool adjective-inclusive name for stage purposes along the lines of great players like Sneaky Pete Kleinow or Lonesome Dave Peverett. Or for that matter (in a somewhat different semantic field/direction?) Sleepy John Estes.