Globe public editor: Keeping up with the Trudeaus – names and titles
Spelling issues aside, readers question creeping Americanisms in Globe copy about the Liberal Party Leader.
Here’s a little style and spelling test. Two of these recent references are correct and one is wrong. Can you guess which?
1. Hadrien Trudeau
2. Prime-minister-designate Justin Trudeau
3. The Trudeaus are Canada’s “first family.”
Answers:
1. Justin Trudeau’s youngest child with wife Sophie Grégoire is Hadrien, with an “e,” not an “a.” On Saturday, Oct. 3, a photo caption used the incorrect “a” spelling, but the feature by Ian Brown on Mr. Trudeau properly used the “e.”
So far, of the references to Hadrien in The Globe, it’s been evenly split between right and wrong – and that’s not good.
Now part of this started with Mr. Trudeau himself, who sent a Twitter announcement of his son’s birth using the “a.” Oops. It was corrected, but the error now seems hard to dislodge.
Last year, the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt wrote about the clarification, saying that between the initial error and the clarification two weeks later, “hearty greetings were sent to baby ‘Hadrian’ by [then] Prime Minister Stephen Harper, New Democratic Party Leader Thomas Mulcair and by hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadians.”
To read the rest of this column, please go to the Globe and Mail's website, where it was originally published.
H.G. Watson was J-Source's managing editor from 2015 to 2018. She is a journalist based in Toronto. You can learn more about her at hgwatson.com.