Theres a journalistic shorthand of prefixing everyone – in day to day news stories theres usually more than one side to an issue and you have to habitually establish which side of the story they’re on, as unless people are household names you need to have a steer on where everyone fits in the story – cop or robber, tory or labour, mod or rocker, so out of habit pretty much any mention of anyone is accompanied by a descriptive phrase – even if its fairly non-descriptive (their age, gender, hair colour). A friend of mine is often mentioned in new stories and gets really wound up by always being pre-fixed ‘mother of two’. In her words ‘Whats wrong with ‘blonde bombshell’?”
“the murdered teenager (insert name)” for years now whenever mentioned on the news. Why can’t just their names be used?
with rare the exceptions like my GF who we’re pretty sure is the only person with her name in the world, you can usually expect that there are at least a few people sharing the same name.
