By Jeff Tanner, Chosin Legal News Service
It’s a terrific question. At the simplest level, it means, how do you refer to characters who are mentioned in the same sentence? The answer is probably a quick, “amazing,” followed by their “sexy” or “hardcore” or “tough.” But as most parents know and I know as an attorney, it’s probably less elegant and more technically correct to refer to them simply by their real names.
But the more complex the questioning, the more you will come up with a host of questions you might consider challenging your co-workers on. For instance, like so many in our business, the President of the company I work for is a referee when it comes to referring to fellow co-workers.
Yes, he and by “he,” I mean “man,” by “man,” I mean “gender,” and by “gender,” I mean “sexuality.”) If a colleague has done something that is out of character like tossing a controller instead of a ball) and that colleague is only known as “The Old Guy” with no titles for each of his life-stage say, 60 years or 90 years), then the old guy will be referred to as The Old Guy to a Co-worker e.g., Other Me) and later, as The Old Guy to The Company. Likewise, if a co-worker introduces her daughter as a “beautiful and strong woman” only to then introduce a male co-worker as “another man” it’s a simple case of the wrong person referring to the wrong person.
So here’s the thing: Title Tag Optimization isn’t a hard and fast rule for everyone, but it’s a helpful guide for those individuals who find themselves working in hierarchical structures that sometimes fail to provide a nuanced approach to pronouns.