Mind your language
I was surprised by the number of people who disliked the Daily Telegraph’s headline on the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy: ‘“God’s rottweiler” is the new pope’. I don’t think it was meant to be as rude as many thought. But what puzzled me was that I had never heard anyone refer to Ratzinger as ‘God’s rottweiler’.
It seems to be a common failure of the whole press to assert that people are ‘known as’ some catchy nickname, when no one ever uses it. One might call it the Dubbing Fallacy.
Dub, since the 12th century has signified the conferring of a knighthood, and by the 16th century had been extended to mean ‘to give a nickname’. Shakespeare in Henry V writes ‘To dub thee with the name of Traitor’. It is just that when a newspaper says that someone is ‘known as’ or ‘dubbed’ with a name, you will find that name is only ever linked with the person in the context of a newspaper sentence saying that this is how they are known or dubbed.
So, Roberto Calvi was only ever called ‘God’s banker’ in newspaper articles saying, ‘Roberto Calvi, known as God’s banker’. The pre-papal Ratzinger attracted other attempts at dubbing. He was also ‘dubbed the Panzerkardinal’, except no one in Rome, or Munich either, said, ‘I’m having dinner tonight with the Panzerkardinal’.
For some reason the Mail on Sunday, a paper that Veronica sometimes brings into the house, seems particularly given to dubbing. Last year it wrote about the Czech singer, Magdalena Kozená, whose ‘fans have dubbed her “the operatic Bond Girl”’. Imagine what non-fans must have dubbed her.
There were two dubbings in a single article in the MoS in February, both of unknowns (to me). There was ‘Gary McCormick, dubbed New Zealand’s Des O’Connor’ and an impresario, Max Markson, apparently ‘dubbed “Mr 20 per cent” by the Australian media’. A month earlier the same newspaper had written about Harry Redknapp, a football manager, I think, who was ‘dubbed the Judas of the South Coast’. But dubbing thrives elsewhere too. In a review of his new book, the Independent said that Geoffrey Wheatcroft had ‘some acidic fun about the destructive influence on the post-Thatcher Tories of what he dubs the “Maggobite press”’. That’s a dubbing that I doubt will take.
The Evening Standard went so far as to claim that ‘St Mawes was dubbed “the new St Tropez” by GMTV’. But it did see the joke.
Except for knights, I think we have had enough dubbing.
Dot Wordsworth
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