A false, coined, fake, bogus or pseudo-title, also called a Time-style adjective and an anarthrous nominal premodifier, is a kind of preposed appositive phrase before a noun predominantly found in journalistic writing.
The linguist Charles F. Meyer wrote that "pseudo-titles" differ from titles in providing a description rather than honoring the person (and that there are gray areas, such as "former Vice President Dan Quayle").
[4] The practice occurs as early as the late 19th century, as in "The culmination of the episode at Sheepshead Bay last week between Trainer William Walden and Reporter Mayhew, of the Herald … seems to reflect little credit on Editor Bennett.
"[11] Meyer has compared the International Corpus of English with an earlier study to document the spread of the construction from American newspapers to those of other countries in the last two decades of the 20th century.
He gave an example of "a legitimate title ... combined with an illegitimate one" in "Ohio Supreme Court Judge and former trial lawyer James Garfield", which he said was an inversion of the normal "James Garfield, Ohio Supreme Court Judge and former trial lawyer" that gained nothing but awkwardness.
[5] In 1987, Roy Reed, a professor of journalism, commented that such a sentence as, "This genteel look at New England life, with a formidable circulation of 1 million, warmly profiles Hartland Four Corners, Vt., resident George Seldes, 96", was "gibberish".
"[9] R. L. Trask, a linguist, used the phrase "preposed appositive" for constructions such as "the Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould."
[6] In 2004 another linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, addressed the subject while commenting on the first sentence of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, which begins, "Renowned curator Jacques Saunière...." Pullum says that a sentence beginning with an "anarthrous occupational nominal premodifier" is "reasonable" in a newspaper,[15] and "It's not ungrammatical; it just has the wrong feel and style for a novel."
"[10] Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage agrees that the construction "presents no problem of understanding", and those who are not journalists "need never worry about it" in their writing.
[17]In 2009, usage writer William Safire stated that the article "the" gives the title excessive emphasis and that it sounds strange to American speakers.