A writer friend and I were chatting the other day about titles, as he’d been told by his agent that the title of his novel was Simply Too Long, and that long titles are more appropriate to novellas or short stories (perhaps because the former are unmarketable anyway, so why bother, and the former are a bit of an anything goes medium, so why not bother?).

I’m not sure whether it’s that long titles are unmarketable, or whether they’ve simply gone out of vogue in the wake of myriad books titled the X-ly V Z of A and B (where X and V are both adjectives not used since the 1800s, Z represents an adventure, a misadventure, or something of the sort, and A and B are both quaint Victorian-era names stolen from British towns). I’m a bit of a fan of the long title myself, being a person who loves any excuse to jumble a bunch of words together in an attempt to see how long I can talk without taking a breath.

Instead, it seems, a titly trend of late is that along the lines of Adjective Adjective. Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely, for example, which makes absolutely no sense to anyone who’s not a Cockney cab driver or a New Zealand test cricket player, and the forthcoming Wondrous Strange (Lesley Livingston), which my semantics lecturer could easily make the topic of a semester’s study.

I might grudgingly admit that these titles one-up the old faithful ‘The X’ (where ‘X’ = noun with spooky connotations), if only for the fact that one can spend hours of jolly perplexity attempting to diagram such odd collocations, but, oh dear, there are some wicked(ly) cruel onomasticians out there.