17 ms·

These "X, or: Y" titles are becoming an annoying cliche.

mprovost 4y ago
The earliest title with this format that I know of is "Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do" by James Thurber and EB White from 1929. But, that book was a parody so presumably copied the form of its title from contemporary books.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  The most famous book title I know with that format is Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It's so old a style that I find it funmy that it could be seen as a fad.
  - mprovost 4y ago
    True, but I was matching on "or, why" not just "or".
- datpiff 4y ago
  Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
- irishsultan 4y ago
  According to wikipedia even shakespeare parodied the style of subtitles in "Twelfth Night, or What You Will", so again much older than 1929.
saurik 4y ago
These titles are actually forced by websites like Hacker News, as a dry and fully-descriptive title doesn't get clicked--nor should it, as it has no reason to make the reader care--and yet Hacker News has this unfortunate rule where it usually attempts to disallow what it calls "editorializing" and so the way users coming from other sites often try to submit things--using pull quotes to direct the reader to specific informative bits that make them more likely to read the article--get their title reverted (even often awkwardly after the post has received a ton of upvotes and the discussion has surrounded the submitted "title", which I feel should be a signal that--at least in some examples--the title wasn't harmful, and was merely "I wanted to link to one paragraph and not a full article", which otherwise requires "blogspam" where you write an article that summarizes the other article and calls out the paragraph, which is also disallowed for good reason, and so this website also awkwardly encourages casual plagiarism). The result is that, rather than articles getting contextually-dependent links that are customized for the community and the time (and which lead to particular discussions), you as the author have to try to come up with a single title that somehow manages to simultaneously be a reasonable title but also serves as its own pull quote (which also effectively prevents long content or manuals from getting linked at all)... it is utter madness, and that the moderators here don't seem to understand this dynamic (even in a "we realize this is bad but we are stuck with it for various reasons--which may include some that are trade offs--but are interested in looking into alternative options" way... dang, as one example, seriously seems to only defend this behavior as good, citing some form of author control despite failing to show that this isn't a problem for authors) is the main reason I wish Hacker News didn't have a from-network monopoly on this community :(.
- arp242 4y ago
  It was intended to be "a dry and fully-descriptive title" though. Originally I wrote "why does ^I insert tab?" because it's a common question that kept coming up on the vi.stackexchange.com site. I figured a canonical slightly more in-depth answer would be useful. To properly explain things a table is useful; but you can't really add that well on Stack Exchange sites because there's very limited formatting, so I had to create a site. I also never found ascii(1) convenient and most search results for "ascii table" are crap, so it became a "two flies with one stone" kind of thing. Then I couldn't decide which title to use, so I added both. That's the only reason the page has the title that it has: the page has two purposes, so it has two titles. It wasn't intended to be cute or to grab anyone's attention. I'm surprised it was even submitted (and upvoted) here.

The earliest title with this format that I know of is "Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do" by James Thurber and EB White from 1929. But, that book was a parody so presumably copied the form of its title from contemporary books.

shadowofneptune 4y ago
The most famous book title I know with that format is Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. It's so old a style that I find it funmy that it could be seen as a fad.
- mprovost 4y ago
  True, but I was matching on "or, why" not just "or".
datpiff 4y ago
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
irishsultan 4y ago
According to wikipedia even shakespeare parodied the style of subtitles in "Twelfth Night, or What You Will", so again much older than 1929.

saurik 4y ago

These titles are actually forced by websites like Hacker News, as a dry and fully-descriptive title doesn't get clicked--nor should it, as it has no reason to make the reader care--and yet Hacker News has this unfortunate rule where it usually attempts to disallow what it calls "editorializing" and so the way users coming from other sites often try to submit things--using pull quotes to direct the reader to specific informative bits that make them more likely to read the article--get their title reverted (even often awkwardly after the post has received a ton of upvotes and the discussion has surrounded the submitted "title", which I feel should be a signal that--at least in some examples--the title wasn't harmful, and was merely "I wanted to link to one paragraph and not a full article", which otherwise requires "blogspam" where you write an article that summarizes the other article and calls out the paragraph, which is also disallowed for good reason, and so this website also awkwardly encourages casual plagiarism). The result is that, rather than articles getting contextually-dependent links that are customized for the community and the time (and which lead to particular discussions), you as the author have to try to come up with a single title that somehow manages to simultaneously be a reasonable title but also serves as its own pull quote (which also effectively prevents long content or manuals from getting linked at all)... it is utter madness, and that the moderators here don't seem to understand this dynamic (even in a "we realize this is bad but we are stuck with it for various reasons--which may include some that are trade offs--but are interested in looking into alternative options" way... dang, as one example, seriously seems to only defend this behavior as good, citing some form of author control despite failing to show that this isn't a problem for authors) is the main reason I wish Hacker News didn't have a from-network monopoly on this community :(.

arp242 4y ago
It was intended to be "a dry and fully-descriptive title" though. Originally I wrote "why does ^I insert tab?" because it's a common question that kept coming up on the vi.stackexchange.com site. I figured a canonical slightly more in-depth answer would be useful. To properly explain things a table is useful; but you can't really add that well on Stack Exchange sites because there's very limited formatting, so I had to create a site. I also never found ascii(1) convenient and most search results for "ascii table" are crap, so it became a "two flies with one stone" kind of thing. Then I couldn't decide which title to use, so I added both. That's the only reason the page has the title that it has: the page has two purposes, so it has two titles. It wasn't intended to be cute or to grab anyone's attention. I'm surprised it was even submitted (and upvoted) here.