Ah, now this is the kind of esoteric intellectual nit-picking I love: the use of colons in book titles. The Chronicle of Higher Education tracks it in “No Mark of Distinction” (link via Arts & Letters Daily).
Over the last two decades, academic titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons.
“We joke about the title and the subtitle needing colonoscopies,” says Anita Samen, managing editor in the book division of the University of Chicago Press. “People have gone hog-wild with colons.” […]
[Director of the University of Illinois Press, Willis G.] Rieger also bemoans the increase in the number of books that have not only a title and subtitle but also another subtitle. There’s this “assumption that the title needs to tell you everything that’s in the book, that it needs to be something like a mini-abstract.” He says it’s a reversion to an 18th-century practice in which books had lengthy titles and subtitles. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, originally titled Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships, is an example.
Heh, guilty.
3 replies on “The colon: a love story”
guilty here as well, i usually have to edit out the free flow of them in my posts before publishing
Ah, the bane of my existence. All day I design and produce educational magazines, and it seems that every single article employs this unimaginative method of titling.
Arrrrggggghhhh!!!!!!
Colons? I’m up to my ears in colons today. 😉
BTW, maybe “colectomy” is more appropriate than “colonoscopy.” (After all, editors are trying to remove the pesky colons, not look inside them.) (Excessively nerdy, I know.)
Glad no one’s making an effort to remove parentheses! Otherwise I’d be in trouble!