What is the metaphysical status of a title? How can you tell if a story has a title? Stories don’t have metadata. Blog posts do have metadata and it was the title field of the blog post. The story definitely doesn’t have any other title. If the title field had been “a story,” people would assert that it was untitled. Yes, it was a prefatory remark building context, but that isn’t disqualifying from being a title.
If the story doesn’t have a title, but people want to discuss it, some kind of title will get established by convention, and it should be something that “sounds right” for the story. “Clarity didn’t work...” doesn’t sound right to me as the title of the story. Also now that you reminded me of this, I went “wait, wasn’t the story just commonly known as The Whispering Earring”, and indeed, here’s /r/rational calling it that in 2019.
What is the metaphysical status of a title? How can you tell if a story has a title? Stories don’t have metadata. Blog posts do have metadata and it was the title field of the blog post. The story definitely doesn’t have any other title. If the title field had been “a story,” people would assert that it was untitled. Yes, it was a prefatory remark building context, but that isn’t disqualifying from being a title.
If the story doesn’t have a title, but people want to discuss it, some kind of title will get established by convention, and it should be something that “sounds right” for the story. “Clarity didn’t work...” doesn’t sound right to me as the title of the story. Also now that you reminded me of this, I went “wait, wasn’t the story just commonly known as The Whispering Earring”, and indeed, here’s /r/rational calling it that in 2019.