Keith Ivey alertly pointed out a very odd word order in the AP story that I quoted a couple of days ago:
Tresoldi, from northern Italy, appeared concerned that a remark Sunday by Milan Dionigi Cardinal Tettamanzi would put the cardinal in the proverb's risk category. Tettamanzi, 61, spoke of a "very affectionate caress" that John Paul gave him three years ago when tapped to lead the high-profile diocese.
The story is about someone named Dionigi Tettamanzi, who is the cardinal archbishop of Milan. So you might think he would be "Milan Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi" in journalese, like "Harvard logician Henry Sheffer", or "Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn".
And indeed some versions of the AP story have exactly that order:
Tresoldi, from northern Italy, appeared concerned that a remark Sunday by Milan Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi would put him in the proverb’s risk category. Tettamanzi, 61, spoke of a “very affectionate caress” that John Paul gave him three years ago when tapped to lead the high-profile diocese.
The thing is, the title of cardinal has a strange pattern of usage in English: it's always Archbishop Sean O'Malley, but (if the current archbishop of Boston had been elevated to cardinal) he'd traditionally have been called Sean Cardinal O'Malley. When I was a kid, I thought that Cardinal was Francis Spellman's middle name, because what I heard on the radio was always "Francis Cardinal Spellman".
This usage seems to be going out of favor, though I wasn't able to find any online usage manuals that specified the change. Google counts 3,940 for "Francis Cardinal Spellman", and 1,430 for "Cardinal Francis Spellman", a ratio of almost 3 to 1 for the medial placement of the title; but there are 5,030 for "Bernard Cardinal Law", and 32,300 for "Cardinal Bernard Law", a ratio of more than 6 to 1 in the other direction. The practice in news source has swung even further: Google News gives only 9 for "Bernard Cardinal Law" against 353 for "Cardinal Bernard Law". Yahoo News gives only 3 for "Bernard Cardinal Law" and 224 for "Cardinal Berard Law".
Likewise, Google News has 221 for "Dionigi Cardinal Tettamanzi" and 6,760 for "Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi". Among English-language news organizations, the more general order of Title Firstname Lastname now outnumbers the special treatment of Cardinal by 30 to 1 or more, and the AP's house style seems empirically to favor the regularization. This appears to follow the current usage of Catholic Church itself, which puts the title first in pages on the vatican's web site.
So Keith speculates that the AP story originally had "Milan Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi", and some old-fashioned editor at the Winnipeg Sun (on whose site I linked the AP story) corrected the text by moving Cardinal to its traditional place between the first and last names, without noticing that (s)he thereby created an ungrammatical phrase due to the modifier Milan left dangling there without anything to modify. I agree that this is the most likely explanation.
Ironically, there was already a syntactic oddity in the quoted paragraph. In the second sentence
Tettamanzi, 61, spoke of a “very affectionate caress” that John Paul gave him three years ago when tapped to lead the high-profile diocese.
there is a when-phrase without a subject that is obviously intended to apply to Tettamanzi, who was moved to Milan three years ago. Though this is too subtle to count as WTF grammar, I have a hard time not associating the participle tapped with John Paul instead. I don't have this problem to the same extent if an explicit pronoun is inserted:
Tettamanzi, 61, spoke of a “very affectionate caress” that John Paul gave him three years ago when he was tapped to lead the high-profile diocese.
[Update: Chris Waigl emailed
Same in German.
Google, German pages:
9 850 for "Kardinal Joseph Ratzinger" - 5 840 for "Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger"
So it looks as if the medial placement is still a bit more prevalent in German than it is in English.
On the Vatican site, it's all over the place, with a bit of an advantage for putting the title first:
.va domain, German documents:
22 "Kardinal Joseph Ratzinger" - 15 "Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger"
7 "Kardinal Joachim Meisner" - 3 "Joachim Kardinal Meisner"
8 "Kardinal Christoph Schönborn" - 4 "Christoph Kardinal Schönborn"
1 "Kardinal John Henry Newman" - 1 "John Henry Kardinal Newman"
The advantage in English seems to be somewhat more in the Cardinal-first direction -- in English-language documents in the .va domain, Google finds:
| Cardinal First (Middle) Last | First (Middle) Cardinal Last | |
| Bernard Law | 2 |
0 |
| Joseph Ratzinger | 4 |
3 |
| Joachim Meisner | 3 |
0 |
| Christoph Schönborn | 3 |
0 |
| John Henry Newman | 3 |
3 |
| Dionigi Tettamanzi | 4 |
0 |
| Francis Spellman | 0 |
1 |
| Total | 19 |
7 |
Some indication of unstable Vatican usage on this point can be found in the letters from popes to cardinals that are archived on the .va site. For instance a letter dated March 3, 2005, to Cardinal Francis Arinze, puts the "Cardinal" title first in all versions [English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish] -- Latin isn't available. A letter dated December 7, 1978, to Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi also puts the title first in the Italian version, but has a medial title in the Latin version. A letter dated May 10, 1982, to Cardinal Joseph Höffner, has a medial title in the German version
Meinem ehrwürdigen Bruder Joseph Kardinal Höffner
Erzbischof von Köln
und Vorsitzender der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz
and also in the Italian version:
Al mio venerabile Fratello Giuseppe cardinale Höffner,
Arcivescovo di Colonia e
Presidente della Conferenza Episcopale Tedesca
Usage in Latin seems more stable -- on a quick scan, I didn't see any Latin letters to cardinals with non-medial titles, right up to a letter from Febuary 2005 (no translations available) that begins
Venerabili Fratri Nostro
XAVERIO S.R.E. Cardinali LOZANO BARRAGÁN
Pontificii Consilii pro Valetudinis Administris Praesidi
]
[Update: Caelestis at sauvage noble cites further evidence of variation "in the valedictions of the Vatican Secretary of State's letters published on line". ]
Posted by Mark Liberman at April 7, 2005 07:34 AM