A BRACE (a potion? a cure?) of doctors challenges our use of appellations. “In recent weeks The Times, once having given the full name, has subsequently referred to ladies such as the Queen’s grand-daughter, the women’s boxing champion and the children’s laureate by their surnames, while conferring the dignity of a Mr on a suspected male murderer and male terrorists. We find this rather discourteous.”

Our rules on appellations are complex. The style guide says that on news pages, though not on features, arts and sport, almost every surname should be granted the courtesy of a title. The exceptions are convicted offenders, the dead (but not the recently dead, except in obituaries), and cases where common usage omits a title. On news pages, sportsmen, artists, authors, film stars, pop stars, actors, etc, should not be referred to as Mr/Mrs/Ms, etc, except in court cases or exceptional occasions where guilt would be implied by omitting the honorific. We avoid initials and middle initials unless the person is best-known thereby. Ms is nowadays fully acceptable when it is not known for certain if she is Mrs or Miss.

In court proceedings, accused people should be accorded their title (Mr, Miss etc) — however guilty they may appear — after first mention; only convicted persons should be referred to by surname alone. But the style guide urges sensitivity, “especially in murder cases, where the accused is given, for example, his ‘Mr’; the victim should here be accorded the courtesy of the title. Otherwise the stark contrast of, say, Mr X being accused of the murder of Dando can appear gratuitously offensive.” I told you they were complex.

Two weeks ago this column referred to “the lurid killing that caused The Times to thunder out” and thus earned us our nickname of The Thunderer. The victim was Lord Graves, found on February 7, 1830, with his throat cut and two razors by his side, and it was the inquest jury’s swift verdict of suicide that we promptly challenged in a leader. A number of readers were upset that I left the story there, demanding “the next gripping instalment”, as Jack Dodd put it in his e-mail, so I returned to the digital archive. The body was found on a Sunday. The following Wednesday, one day after we attacked the verdict, we reported that Lord Graves had received that Sunday “a parcel containing several caricatures which had been published in consequence of the domestic calamity which had befallen him” — a reference to the well-known break-up of his marriage. On the Friday we published an anonymous letter reading: “Sir, In common, I believe, with the greater part of your readers, I entirely concur in your remarks on the misnamed inquest on Lord Graves. Can you tell me whether any steps have been taken to have another jury summoned, as to allay the ferment that seems likely to be excited, something ought to be done speedily?” However, the same day’s leader page notes defensively: “We have done what we thought right upon the subject of Lord Graves’s destruction: we have professed what we believed. We have some knowledge of the public sentiment, and we think it necessary to inform the family that the public does not go with us.” The following Saturday we reported on his lordship’s funeral, and there, you might think, the matter rests. But there was a curious postscript to the affair, which space precludes me from revealing this week. More next week, perhaps . . .

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