7 ms·
The way this article is written makes me appreciate when articles address the parties involved by Title and Name instead of He or She or just his first name. M
by plgonzalezrx8 8y ago
The way this article is written makes me appreciate when articles address the parties involved by Title and Name instead of He or She or just his first name.
Mr. Jiankui would have been less confusing. Editors should be able to identify issues like this and adjust the writing to avoid confusion IMHO.
- dwighttk 8y agoWould it be Mr. Jiankui or Mr. He?
- mbrubeck 8y ago"He" (贺) is his family name, so it would be Dr. He.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lampington 8y agoUsing that in the article would have made things much less confusing. But journalists tend to avoid titles - perhaps especially when the person in question has apparently done something bad.
- saagarjha 8y agoThe name of the researcher is He Jiankui. Edit: it looks the parent comment was edited after I posted this, and said something along the lines of "I wish articles used the researcher's actual name instead of He or She".
- ginko 8y ago'He' is his surname.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 8y ago> Mr. Jiankui He is his family name, Jiankui is his first name. That'd be like calling Dennis Ritchie "Mr. Dennis" throughout an article.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoSurely Jiankui is his _given_ name then, not his _first_ name as in China the given name comes second, no? So, He Jiankui [xiansheng?] for how Westerners would write Mr. Jiankui He. [Corrected, I confused my Oriental honorifics.]
- mediumdeviation 8y agoThe -san suffix is a honorific used in Japanese. Trying to use it for someone from China would be a really awkward faux pas.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoLol, awkward faux pas are my speciality. Thanks.
- jerf 8y ago"Surely Jiankui is his _given_ name then, not his _first_ name as in China the given name comes second, no? So, He Jiankui [xiansheng?] for how Westerners would write Mr. Jiankui He." To be honest, if you are not intimately familiar with what names tend to be family names and what names tend to be first name in a given culture, you're just hopelessly boned in English media unless they explicitly call it out for you in the article, because sometimes they leave the names in the Oriental ordering, and sometimes they "conveniently" switch them around for you without saying so. (Statistically speaking, I have to imagine there have been cases where the writer switched it to the English order, and then another writer or the editor switched it again, returning to the Oriental order without realizing it....) The end result is, I suggest everyone cut the English-speakers significant slack on this front when they read an article, because even understanding how names work in the East is still not enough to prevent errors.
- ryanmercer 8y agoWe've got a "Who's on First?" situation here.