Sir names, and others
Back in my prep days, I had some reason to make a reference to Alec Douglas-Home, who had disclaimed his peerage — he had been the Earl of Home — because he’d decided to accept an appointment as Prime Minister and deemed it impracticable to serve in that post while also serving in the House of Lords. (This left him, briefly, in the odd position of being Prime Minister without holding a seat in either House of Parliament; he eventually won a by-election and took a seat in the Commons.) Whatever the circumstances, I botched up Douglas-Home’s title, and our happy band of royalist faculty took me aside and explained that he was properly referred to in this context as “Sir Alec.”
The flip side of this rule applies here:
Every time I see it, it’s like fingernails on a chalk board. “da Vinci” is not Leonardo’s last name; it’s an appellation referring to where he was born.
Yes, they hammered away at that one too. Which is how we know Dan Brown didn’t attend this particular school:
That’s what really drove me crazy about The Da Vinci Code, a novel with not only one, but two errors in the title (“da” shouldn’t be capitalized).
But there’s also this:
Some of these same concepts add to the problems of alphabetical ordering. Please file Rogier van der Weyden under W, not V, Vincent van Gogh under G, Leonardo under L, and Domenico Veneziano (Domenico the Venetian) under D.
My own bête noire, in terms of alphabetizing, is the Non-English Article. For some inscrutable reason, I file recordings by Los Bravos, Los Lobos, Los Lonely Boys and Los Straitjackets under L, which is technically correct for only two of the four.
stixx23 »
27 April 2011 · 1:51 pm
So if you’re filing your singles by title rather than artist, does Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke go under S or D? ;)
CGHill »
27 April 2011 · 2:31 pm
Well, actually, I do file them by artist; and my copy of same is on the Songs in the Key of Life album (3-LP plus bonus 45), which is in the W zone.