'Acceptable in all references'

The AP's style announcement today (actually several, so go view the whole thread) is a big deal --not just because of the AP's outsize influence on US news language, but because that influence has reflected the AP's historically conservative approach pretty much forever. Here are a few highlights of how the world has looked through the AP's eyes over the years:

1970: The courtesy title "Mr." is to be used "only with Mrs., or with clerical titles."
1977: "Use black or Negro, as appropriate in the context, for both men and women. Do not use Negress."
1980: "Black" is "acceptable in all references for Negro."
1986: "Native American" should not be used for American Indians because their ancestors "migrated to the continent over a land bridge from Asia."('86 was a momentous year at the Stylebook; women could appear in news stories without courtesy titles; "Dark Continent" was no longer a synonym for "Africa," and "paddy wagon" vanished altogether.)
1994: "Gay" is "acceptable as popular synonym for both male and female homosexuals."
2002: "Sharia" becomes "strict Islamic law" (and picks up a distinction that doesn't exist IRL: the tied-T is marked on adjectives but not nouns). It goes back to being "Islamic law" in 2003.

By "conservative approach" I don't mean "molasses that voted for Goldwater," and I certainly don't mean to slight the excellent work the AP is doing these days applying a just-the-facts approach to the rantings of the White House and its armed propaganda wing. The AP has always had a broad range of contributors and a broad range of users.* The earliest edition of the Stylebook I have is from 1960 (the year AP and UPI started collaborating on a common stylebook), and it notes that the AP had been working for years on ways to provide copy "more nearly conforming with majority usage and thereby make use of TTS tape efficient to the maximum degree": if you don't have to re-keystroke the copy, you cut a step out of the production process. On the user end, the same text is going to the big-city dailies as to the mom-and-pop daily in Kansas. Well beyond the era of hot type, if the New York Herald-Gazoo didn't want courtesy titles for women and the Emporia Democrat-Republican did, it was easier for the H-G to take them out than for the D-R to put them in.**

Style is also one of the main markers of objectivity: when you're citing a "precise" or "specific" usage, as in those non-Native Americans whose ancestors are really Asian, you're deferring to an outside authority rather than imposing your fallible judgment. It's unusual for stylebooks to go as far as the Guardian's "Our use of language should reflect not only changes in society but the newspaper's values"; the default is to decide that you're reflecting the world as it is.

My perspective, should you want it: Good for the AP. I think this was overdue, though I'd also point out that owning an AP Stylebook doesn't mean you have to follow it into the ground. If you've been holding off on a sensible decision on organizational style because the Journalist's Bible tells you so, stop it. You won't hurt the AP's feelings.

Now let's all sit back and wait to see what happens when Fox News hears about this -- given that the AP's 2013 decision to stop using "illegal immigrant" (which the Stylebook had mandated over "undocumented worker" in a 2008 entry) was worth a lead story at the Fox homepage.

* With a lot of overlap; the AP is a co-op, after all. Raise your hand if you've ever chatted with the nearest buro at the end of a shift about which stories it wanted to pick up.
** The NYT had nearly 100 Linotypes around the time the first reference-size edition of the  AP Stylebook came out in 1977. You make the call!

A million here, a million there ...

Yes, I'd say that at 48 kilometers, "towering" barely begins to do it justice:
 

YUMA, Ariz. — On a dirt road past rows of date trees, just feet from a dry section of Colorado River, a small construction crew is putting up a towering border wall that the government hopes will reduce — for good — the flow of immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

Cicadas buzz and heavy equipment rumbles and beeps before it lowers 30-foot-tall (48-kilometer-tall) sections of fence into the dirt. “Ahí está!” — “There it is!” — a Spanish-speaking member of the crew says as the men straighten the sections into the ground. Nearby, workers pull dates from palm trees, not far from the cotton fields that cars pass on the drive to the border.

True it is that everybody's going to count the toes and forget to divide by 10 at some point; the AP isn't the first to get its zeroes and decimal points crossed up in those pesky metric conversions. The more likely sign of the apocalypse is that nothing's built into the system any longer to catch a wire blunder before publication. (The screen grab is from the AP's own site; the text from Military Times.)

Stop it with 'sound bites'

You almost hate to say it, given how well the AP has done over the past few years at calling out lies and bullshit without turning the process into a production number, but -- cut it out, you guys. Look. There are plenty of people who seem to think the point of a congressional hearing is "crisp sound bites." Your job is to ignore those people and deliver the mail. If the sound bites on offer didn't spell things out unambiguously enough for you, let me suggest you ignore the "crisp" ones and concentrate on the unambiguous ones.

Waiting for the correction

Sure, everybody types on autopilot sometimes, and step forward the lucky soul who's never entered "D-N.C." after a Republican's name,* and obviously this is the sort of thing that slipped through in the days of fully staffed desks, but still -- do they REALLY all look alike to the copydesk these days?

This appears to be the AP's wording; I saw it in the local Gannett fishwrap, which promises on page 2A every day to correct "all errors of fact." I'm not holding out a lot of hope on this one, but there was a day when even something so incredibly trivial as confusing the leader of one Korea with the other would have merited a correction in a metro daily.

* Or vice versa; the force of habit knows no party

By the pricking of my thumbs ...

If you were The Associated Press, what do you figure would be a good Elongated Yellow Fruit reference for Anthony Weiner?

Weiner, who's attending his party's national convention in Philadelphia, was asked about the rumored Trump Jr. candidacy, and the cocksure former congressman playfully suggested he would end his political exile to take on the son of the equally brash Trump, a billionaire real estate mogul.

(h/t Merrill)

One born every minute

Stop press! That's Drudge above, coyly using the question mark to kick some paranoid speculation closer to the mainstream. The Gateway Pundit is less circumspect:

... but probably still shouldn't go to the county fair by himself. The evidence appears to be that, um, someone created a file while the story was still being reported. Because that's never happened in the history of journalism.

For the record, I'm singularly unimpressed by the idea that AP's declaration of a "presumptive" nominee is somehow relevant.  I have enough trouble keeping up with fictional categories and made-up titles as it is.

Peever and peeveress He created them

How are things on the Get Off My Lawn front over at The Journalist's Bible?

Q. Is it permissible (by today's rules) to start a sentence with "And"? – from Vancouver, Wash. on Thu, Nov 05, 2015

A. Yes, but avoid overusing that phrasing.

Apparently we're not going to set this one to rest without appealing to a Higher Power, so -- how about it, Creator of Heaven and Earth?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
 
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

OK, so it takes the almighty all of two verses to drop a coordinating conjunction on an independent clause. Surely He wouldn't overuse that phrasing, would He?

• And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.*
• And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
• And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
• And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
• And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
• And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Calm down, ye peevers, and notice a few things God didn't do. "It's official: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," for example. The gloves goeth not on, the gloves cometh not off, and Christmas cometh not early (though -- spoilers! -- that's a plot point in the sequel). But if your question is whether "today's rules" allow you to begin a sentence with "and," the answer is: Yes, and they have ever since "today's rules" meant Shakespeare. And you could look it up, but you (and the AP editors) probably have better stuff to do.

* I know it's traditional to number the verses, but bullets would have looked better on the PowerPoint

Calm down, AP

Q. Which sentence is correct? "When that happens, it can look like one is stepping on the others' toes." Or: "When that happens, it can look like one is stepping on the other's toes." – from Liverpool, N.Y. on Mon, Sep 28, 2015

A. The second.

Along with "did you look it up?" and "no, really -- did you look it up?" and "whichever you want," let's suggest another stock answer for Ask the Editor questions: "Yes."

Maybe more precisely: "Both, but they're each correct about a different thing. Which one did you have in mind?" The first has you (sorry, "one") stepping on more than one set of toes; the second has only one other to worry about the toes of.

The Stylebook doesn't actually have to rule on every question that comes down the pike. It's kind of the editors not to make fun of the really silly ones, but they'd give a better impression of their work -- and avoid turning the study of "style" into a nightmare of random choices -- if they discarded a few of them and gave more sensible answers to others. And yes, "that's not a style question" is a fine answer, too.

"Kathy, I'm lost," I said

Who needs the Fair 'n' Balanced Network when you have the AP?

The news came as Sen. Charles Grassley said two of the emails, which traversed Clinton's insecure home email server, were deemed "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information," which is among the government's highest classifications.

Here's a tip. If you want a server with a robust sense of self-efficacy, rent a Sontaran. Otherwise, the word you want is probably "non-secure."

I regret to report that in a later writethru, it's "two emails that traversed Clinton's personal system." I like the restrictive clause better, but you have to admit it lacks that "Hello, darkness" vibe of the original, and I'm not entirely sure the AP isn't accusing her of swallowing the evidence.

That's not exactly the problem

This one isn't entirely the Freep's fault. It's basically an AP suggested hed with a substitution: "killer" for "shooter," which picks up two counts and allows it to fit. The trouble is that the real shortcut -- "death" for something like "likelihood that a death sentence would be carried out, if approved by the jury" -- takes the corner a little too fast. Death has a way of being awfully certain. That's why we have the cliche.

You could take the hed down a few points and try something like "Death sentence would have been uncertain for theater killer." I'm not passionate about it, but at least Benjamin Franklin isn't rolling over and grabbing for the kite strings.

VIII score and seven years ago

How about those Roman numerals, Ask The Editor?

Q. The Roman numerals entry doesn't make clear AP's stance on movies. Would it be "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" or "Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope" or "Star Wars Episode Four: A New Hope"? – from New York on Wed, Jul 01, 2015

A. Star Wars: Episode VIII

Thanks for clearing that up.

I'm not asking you who's on second

Q. Is it third base line or third baseline? For example: Our seats were on the third base line. – from Des Moines, Iowa on Thu, Jun 11, 2015

A. It's baseline in the "baseball" entry, so make it third baseline.

It may be "baseline" in the baseball entry, but it's "third-base line" in real life for the same reason a businessman who runs a small business is a "small-business man" (I'm looking at the 1986 edition under "s"). The compound can't do its magic if it isn't a compound. You're not even being inconsistent -- this is what compounds do to reduce ambiguity. (A book written for schoolchildren in the primary grades is written for ...)

If your seats are behind the third-base dugout (not the third basedugout), you're along the baseline that goes from home to third, which is the first baseline if you're going left to right but the second baseline if you're counting right to left. So who decided to go with "third baseline"? I don't know.

Because ... he died in 1989?

There is, as alert readers might have noticed, a pretty straightforward problem with Thursday's Obama Shock Outrage question: Mistah Khomeini, he dead. Thus it's kind of fun to trace the tale back through the journalistic checkpoints to its apparent beginnings. (Yes, you can draw conclusions about the quality of Near East reporting these sources provide.)

The Fox Nation -- which, oddly, managed to find a picture of the right guardian/jurisprudent for the homepage -- borrows both its film clip here and its text from the Daily Caller, as credited in the insert:

During Thursday’s White House briefing, the Associated Press’ Jim Kuhnhenn interrogated press secretary Josh Earnest over the Obama administration’s unequal treatment of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Not entirely true, but hang on a second:

Kuhnhenn asked the White House flack why the Ayatollah is getting “the benefit of the doubt” from the administration over comments about the Iran deal last week, but Netanyahu does not after his comments that there would be no Palestinian state.

Read more »

Hyphens: Ur still doin it wrong

Q. Should "square foot" be hyphenated when used in front of a noun. For example "a 100 square-foot covered porch..." – from thornton, Pa. on Sat, Feb 21, 2015

A. Correct.

Partially correct at best -- yes, "square foot" should be hyphenated, but AP style also says pretty clearly that compounds of numbers and dimensions are hyphenated before nouns they modify. If you should hyphenate "the 5-foot-6-inch man" and "the 5-foot man" (pp. 76), you'd certainly want to hyphenate the whole of "100-square-foot covered porch." Why would the rule go away just because "square foot" is two words? After all, the "hyphens" entry itself says "use hyphens to link all the words in the compound except the adverb very and all adverbs that end in -ly" (p. 292).

"The fewer hyphens, the better" is the wrong way to go about setting up a rule. What you want is the right number of good hyphens and no bad hyphens. If that means you write "ice cream cone" on one page and "ice-cream-cone-shaped UFO" on another, fine. That's not inconsistent; it's consistent about avoiding foolish consistency.

Three decade-old zombie rules

Q. Which is correct: The 20-million-year-old scroll or the 20 million-year-old scroll? – from Tucson, Ariz. on Fri, Feb 20, 2015

A. The second, though prehistoric dates are better phrased without a compound modifier: an object estimated to be 20 million years old. That long predates humans so it couldn't be a scroll.

With respect to our friends at Ask the Editor (who, to their great credit, introduce the annual revisions to the gospel in front of a room full of rabid style nerds, which takes no small amount of sand) -- no. That's just wrong, and it's wrong on a lot of levels, so stop it before you do any more damage to the cause of style.

AP style, like many, exempts number compounds of the million, billion and percent flavor from the general rule on hyphenating preposed modifiers -- reasoning, quite sensibly, that "$7.82 billion budget" and "4 percent increase" simply don't create the sort of ambiguity you get from "man eating blancmange" vs. "man-eating blancmange." The problem comes when the little compound turns into a bigger compound: in the example I still use in class, when a dozen photos taken 20 or so years ago become "two decade-old photos." It's charitable to call that one ambiguous; the word you want is "wrong."

You could always write a rule that says "use hyphens to be clear" and count on the grownups in the room to figure it out on the fly. They generally do, but human beings -- especially copy editors -- are rule-loving creatures. If you're going to write a hyphen rule, write one that isn't likely to paint you into a corner: "Hyphenate the whole damn compound."

While you're at it? "Prehistoric" doesn't seem like a very intuitive cutoff point for when a bunch of numbers ought to be clumped into a compound. And if you think something couldn't be a scroll because it predates humans and their silly artifacts, you haven't been paying attention.

Yes and no, but no, and yes. And no.

Q. Hello. How would you write "a drugmaker that makes generic drugs": "generic-drug maker," "generic-drug-maker" or something else? Thanks. – from Tustin, Calif. on Thu, Sep 18, 2014

A. The Stylebook spelling is drugmaker, so the first is correct.

Dear AP: You're at least partly right about something, though not about what the questioner asks or even entirely about what you answer. The question from Tustin appears to be about how to shorten the phrase by preposing "generic drugs," not about whether the longer form is already correct-ish. You could instead be raising consciousness about why "generic-drug maker" is an exception to the Stylebook's spelling of "drugmaker."

What we want to avoid is letting the Stylebook drag us into doing something stupid -- making the drugmaker, rather than the drugs, generic, in the same sort of way careless writers turn women who run small businesses into teeny-tiny businesswomen.You don't want the adjective to modify the compound noun: small businesswoman, generic drugmaker. What you want is a compound modifier, and you're going to link it up just the way Tustin suggested: small-business woman, generic-drug maker. Or you can just use the longer form: A maker of generic drugs, women who run small businesses. And if someone wails that you're not being consistent, you should respond: At least I'm not being dumb.

Editing basics: Stick to the question

Sometimes the nice folks at Ask the Editor just take their, and everybody else's, eye off the ball:

Q. Regarding the use of gender neutral nomenclature, how should we refer to manholes and manhole covers? – from San Francisco on Wed, Aug 13, 2014

A. Use the impersonal pronoun it for an inanimate object.

Yes, but that's not the issue, is it? Nobody's really wondering whether a manhole cover, like a noble ship of the line, ought to be "she" on second reference, or whether such decisions show us as we want to be seen in the great social scheme of things. The writer has a simple question, and a simple answer -- how about "utility hole"? -- will let everybody go about their business.

Lesson for editors: Don't overthink the easy ones. The nearest exit may be behind you. Time you waste is time you can't spend on something that matters.

Today in 'Ask the Editor'

Q. I am writing material that requires Imperial dimensions with parenthetical metric dimensions. Would I write "the 60-foot-tall (20-meter) tree" or "the 60-foot (20-meter) tall tree"? – from Charlotte, N.C. on Sun, Feb 23, 2014

A. The 60-foot-tall (20-meter) tree ...

Dear Charlotte: Neither of the above. A 60-foot tree is about 18.3 meters (18 if you use the feet-to-meters conversion on page 170 of your AP Stylebook, which is a little less accurate than its meters-to-feet counterpart).

Practically, your audience is likely to default to height if that's the only number you mention, so "the 60-foot (18.3-meter) tree" would be fine. But if your style is picky enough to demand both measurements, it's picky enough to tolerate a little arithmetic and a decimal point.

That seems to be the least of your problems

Today in "Ask the Editor":

Q. Which is the correct use of the pronoun WHO and WHOM? I understand that who is used for subjects and who for objects of a sentence. But for this case, I am confused since I am writing in the passive voice. Is it Who or Whom that goes after the name Rachel Rosen? "I was referred to you through a mutual friend, Elizabeth Lewis, WHO or WHOM I met through Couchsurfing." Thanks so much.

It's exceptionally polite of David and the gang to answer "whom," rather than, say, "Why would the answer be any different if you'd written in the active voice?" Or, even more to the point: "Where did Rachel go?"

Annotated 'Ask the Editor'

Today's helpful suggestion for confused readers of the Stylebook's "Ask the Editor" feature:

Q. Should we refer to the government shutdown as a "partial" government shutdown? Are they interchangeable? Is "slim down" a biased word? – from San Diego on Mon, Oct 07, 2013
A. In AP stories, partial government shutdown in initial references, thereafter shutdown. The other term doesn't seem accurate for this standoff.

A: No. "Slim down" would be two biased words, except that nobody's using it for the nouns "slimdown," "SlimFast" or "Slimghazi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" Those are interchangeable with "Kenyan death stare."