[(myl) A comparison of ngram counts for sequences like 'book entitled/titled' suggests that 'titled' was not used much in this sense until the middle of the 20th century - and is still the minority usage, by a large factor: Interestingly, I've encountered the opposite 'correction', with 'entitled' being held up as the better and more standard choice. Filed by Mark Liberman under Prescriptivist poppycock.Cambridge University Press for the British Council, 1985. English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures: Papers of an International Conference Entitled 'Progress in English Studies' Held in London, 17-21 September 1984 to Celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the British Council and Its Contribution to the Field of English Studies Over Fifty Years. the citation Quirk, Randolph, and Henry George Widdowson, eds. This book.ought to be entytled the reule and gouernement of the body and of the sowle.Īnd among hundreds of thousands of authoritative uses in the 20th century, we have e.g. Going back to the 15th century, the OED cites Caxton on Cato: We might allude in particular, for examples of what we mean, to the lines on a Picture by Claude Lorraine, and to the exquisite poem, entitled Laodamia. William Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age: His poem entitled 'Sympathy' reveals the tenderness under that triple steel of stoicism, and the intellectual subtilty it could animate. Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing about Thoreau: Many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems, whether printed or manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much, uniformly made an exception in favour of the Christabel and the Poem, entitled Love. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria: George Bannatine, when students in divinity, wrote a poem, entitled The Resurrection, copies of which were handed about in manuscript. Thomas Warton made this remark to me and, in support of it, quoted from the poem entitled The Bastard, a line, in which the fancied superiority of one 'stamped in Nature's mint with extasy,' is contrasted with a regular lawful descendant of some great and ancient family. For example, James Boswell wrote in his Life of Samuel Johnson: Given LLOG's reputation, it's probably a trolling attempt - but I'll bite anyhow, since some of our readers may have been bullied in similar fashion.įor hundreds of years, 'entitled X' has been used by elite writers of standard English to mean 'bearing the title X'.

This is nonsense, as usual asserted confidently without any evidence. Unless the letters are 'entitled' to an ice cream cone. In reference to: This ties in perfectly with the recent post entitled 'Once more on the present continuative ending -ing in Chinese' in two ways:Įntitled is incorrect.

Once more unto the fray