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A false, coined, fake, bogus or pseudo-title, also called a Time-style adjective and an anarthrous nominal premodifier, is a kind of preposed apposition phrase before a noun predominantly found in journalese. 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".
Some usage writers condemn false titles, and others defend it. Its use was originally American, but it has become widely accepted in some other countries. In British usage it was generally confined to tabloidese newspapers but has been making some headway on British websites in recent years.
In "Professor Herbert Marcuse", "Professor" is a title, while in "famed New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse",. "famed New Left philosopher" has the same syntax, with the omitted at the beginning, but is not a title. The linguist Charles F. Meyer wrote that "pseudo-titles" differ from titles in providing a description rather than honoring the person (and that there are gray areas, such as "former Vice President Dan Quayle").
Meyer notes that "pseudo-titles" (as he calls them) rarely contain a modifying phrase after the initial noun phrase, that is, forms such as "MILF Vice Chairman for Political Affairs Al-Hajj Murad Ebrahim" for the head of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front are rare. Furthermore, they cannot begin with a genitive phrase, "Osias Baldivino, the bureau's litigation and prosecution division chief" cannot be changed to "bureau's litigation and prosecution division chief Osias Baldivino": "bureau's" would need to be removed. He also cites Randolph Quirk's principle of "end-weight", which says that weightier parts of sentences are better placed at the end of sentences or smaller structures. Thus pseudo-titles, which by definition go at the beginning, tend to be short. He notes that pseudo-titles in New Zealand and Philippine newspapers are much more likely to exceed five words than those in the United States and Britain.
False titles are widely used in Nigerian English, capitalized and with a comma separating them from the person's name. This usage is considered incorrect in other countries.
In 1987, Roy Reed, a professor of journalism, commented that such a sentence as, "This genteel look at New England life, with a formidable circulation of 1 million, warmly profiles Hartland Four Corners, Vt., resident George Seldes, 96", was "gibberish". He added that the phrase "right-wing spokesman Maj. Roberto D'Aubuisson" was ambiguous, as the reader could not tell whether D'Aubuisson was the single spokesman for the El Salvador right wing or one of many. In addition to placing the descriptive phrase after the name, "where it belongs", Reed suggested that if the phrase goes before the name, it should begin with a or the. Kenneth Bressler, a usage writer, also recommended avoiding the construction and suggested additional ways of doing so in 2003..
The only prescriptive comment in The Columbia Guide to Standard English (2015) is that these constructions "can be tiresome." R. L. Trask, a linguist, used the phrase "preposed appositive" for constructions such as "the Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould." In strong terms, he recommended including the initial the (and employing such constructions sparingly anyway)..
In 2004 another linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, addressed the subject while commenting on the first sentence of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which begins, "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière...." Pullum says that a sentence beginning with an "anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier" is "reasonable" in a newspaper, and "It's not ungrammatical; it just has the wrong feel and style for a novel." He further commented that it sounds "like the opening of an obituary rather than an action sequence". False titles are peculiar to Brown's style and occur often in his body of work, Pullum claiming in 2004 that he has "never yet found anyone but Dan Brown using this construction to open a work of fiction".
Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage agrees that the construction "presents no problem of understanding", and those who are not journalists "need never worry about it" in their writing. Likewise, The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) classifies these constructions as "journalese".. In 2012 Philip B. Corbett of The New York Times wrote, "We try to avoid the unnatural journalistic mannerism of the 'false title' – that is, using a description or job designation with someone's name as if it were a formal title. So we don't refer to 'novelist Zadie Smith' or 'cellist Yo-Yo Ma'." The 2015 edition of the paper's manual of style says:
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