The word books are here!

This doesn't matter to anyone outside the publishing industry, and only to about half of them, but The Chicago Manual of Style has coughed up an 18th edition, and made the front cover a friendly-but-eye-hurting yellow rather than their previous trademark orange.  

For those who don't know (and certainly needn't care), the manual is a big book, a list price $75 book, that standardizes everything in the book publishing process from the smallest punctuation to the largest production demands. Newspapers don't use it; they follow the Associated Press style guide. Medical publishers generally follow the AMA's style guide, I believe. I own those, too. And then there's Words Into Type, a sort of rival of CMS, but not given to as many editions. It's often used as a supplement, because there's nothing a 1,200-page cinder block of a book needs more than a supplement. 

The University of Chicago Press began dispensing publishing wisdom in 1891, as a sheet that contained the information for the publisher's compositors and pressmen, who had to deal with scruffy manuscripts from scruffy professors (or so I imagine). 

Even at such an early stage, “the University Press style book and style sheet” was considered important enough to be preserved, along with other items from the Press’s early years, in the cornerstone of the new Press building in 1903.

That sheet grew into a pamphlet, and by 1906 the pamphlet had become a book: Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of types in use—otherwise known as the 1st edition of the Manual. At 200 pages, the original Manual cost 50 cents, plus 6 cents for postage and handling.

It's the bible for most book publishers, as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is for the headshrinkers, or the Pocket Pal is for graphics and reproduction guys. (You may insert your Pocket Pal joke here.) 

The CMS doesn’t change much between editions. The 17th was published in 2017. The last few have been busy keeping up with technological changes. And yet it's important to have the most recent one so that we're all quite literally on the same page. If I get into a fight with an editor or writer over the capitalization of celestial objects, I want to refer them to 8.143 (the 143rd section of chapter 8) to show that aurora borealis is set in lowercase. As you can see, the CMS plays referee.  

Despite this, I used to work at a company where the copy chief absolutely refused to use the 15th edition, demanding that we galley slaves stay with the 14th. I do not know why he had it in for the 15th, but he was not kidding. Down with the 15th! was his cry. Soon after I was laid off from that job, the 16th edition came out. I am still afraid the shock may have killed him. 

I haven't looked at the 18th much yet. I worry that they've decided to stuff it with a bunch of politically correct stuff -- how to handle newly coined pronouns, how to address someone who identifies as a wallaby, that kind of thing. It can’t be helped. At least the book remains a noble defender of the serial comma.

Now that I've whipped you into a Chicago Manual of Style frenzy, you will be glad to know that you can buy merch.

The number on the back makes me laugh. Like you play third base for the Chicago Manuals of Style. Can’t tell the players without a scorecard.

Missing thee.

It's never going to stop being strange to me, how in American churches we spend 99% of the Mass speaking like twentieth-century humans, and then the Lord's Prayer comes up and we're back in the 1600s. "Hallowed be Thy name...."

I think about this from time to time, mainly because I wonder:

1) How did "thee" and "thy" and "thine" and "thou" get shoved aside by "you" and "your" and "yours" and, uh, "you"? You was once the plural form of thee. Nowadays if we want to do a plural version of you we're forced to say youse, you lot, y'all, all y'all, and even sillier things, depending on where you are. (Contrary to popular belief, even the Amish don't use thee, thou, and thy when speaking English.)

2) Why have we stuck with the old construction on the Our Father (and some other ancient prayers like the Hail Mary), but not elsewhere in Mass? I don't know of any churches that use "thee" and "thy" except in the Lord's Prayer, and more modern ones have broken the tradition. Not Catholics! 

3) Is it dumb to keep theeing and thying when we don't speak that way normally? 

Courtesy of BibleInfo

Okay, so, first: What happened to thee? Merriam-Webster asked that musical question, "Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'?" To quote from their piece:

Formerly we used thou as the second person singular pronoun (which simply means that we would use thou to address another single person). Thee was used in the objective or oblique case (when referring to the object of a verb or preposition), and thou was used in the nominative (when indicating the subject of a verb).

The thing is, one couldn't go saying to the king, "Hey! Thou king!" For some reason the privilege of office -- maybe to stress that one was not just talking to the king, but to everyone in his army sworn to defend him as well -- required the plural. Ah, but as Old English became nuttin' but a cheese and Middle English took over, the democratization of the language brought You to the masses: 

Initially you was used to refer to a person of high social standing (such as royalty, who would be addressed as “your majesty”) but soon came to be used as well when speaking with a social equal.

While dabbling with the Society for Creative Anachronism in college, I learned the classic insult: "I do not bite my thumb at you, m'lord, I bite my thumb at thee." Thee's fightin' words! 

Aside from insults, thou was mostly used for either servants or the socially intimate, but that faded over time as well. 

Okay, so why do we still use the form for the Lord's Prayer? Tradition! 

In the original King James Version, in Matthew 6:9, when Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, it's rendered in English this way:

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

In Luke 11:1, the prayer is slightly different: 

And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.

The King James translation was not the first translation of the Bible into English, but it was the premiere English-language Bible available between 1611 and 1769, so its impact had staying power. It was the Bible brought to the American Colonies. Further, when Benjamin Blayney created a revised translation for the Oxford University Press in 1769, he retained the thees and thous. In many houses, if there was any book at all, it was the KJV; if anyone heard any book read aloud anywhere, it was in church. So that's one way to nail down a particular manner of speech, even if the language is changing rapidly outside, by having the language reflected in the most crucial point of culture. 

As modern versions have arisen, using the current idioms such as you and yours, we have found that the thees and thys are so stuck in us culturally that it's hard to change. Even the US Conference of Catholic Bishops uses an updated text, and yet it's almost certain any American Catholic you know will go for the thees and thys. Heck, even people who know nothing of the Bible but have some cultural awareness of the faith will be theeing and thying when they think of the Our Father. 

So: Are we being dumb by using thy for the Our Father? If anything, is it an insult to call God by the singular pronoun, when we wouldn't have done that to Old English kings?

I'm not so sure, actually. We testify that there is "One God, the Father, the Almighty," who although the first of the Holy Trinity, is one God, not a pantheon. In that case, since His Son taught us the prayer to address His Father, it makes sense to not only use but insist on the singular pronoun for the Lord's Prayer. On the other hand, a prayer that addresses the entire Trinity would need to have the plural pronoun. The most prominent one of those is the Glory Be, or Gloria Patri, which names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but uses no pronouns. 

I've decided not to argue with anyone either way about this. People have gotten awfully weird about pronouns lately. 

Yes, we should use the updated language used in the very authorized Bible upon which our English-speaking church relies. But tradition is more important than ever in this era, an era that wants dearly to take every possible tradition, everything from longer ago than the nineties, burn it, and take a dump on the ashes. 

In England, the country that gave us the great King James Version of the Bible, Christians are a minority for the first time in 1500-odd years. What follows when a nation turns from faith in Christ is never good. At this juncture, we'd better hold on to all the great traditions we have. 

My pronouns.

I was filling out some paperwork for a client, and right at the bottom I was asked to submit my pronouns, if I desired to do so. Naturally it took everything I had not to write Itt/Itt's.

I just left it blank. Let 'em guess.

People are very serious about this pronoun nonsense, but it's nothing to be serious about. It's as if we all got hyperfocused on ink colors, and refused to have anything to do with people who used blue ink, and would actually assault and try to ruin the lives of someone who used red. And God help us if we discovered a box of crayons. 

I think the only way to survive this silliness is to not play along. One of the advantages of being an adult is that you can sit at the kids' table for fun, but you can go to the grown-ups' table to dine. What we have now is a culture where everyone is pretending to be a bratty kid who won't stop playing when food is served. We are a culture that in effect is providing alcoholics with free booze so they don't get testy and ruin the party. We are supposed to play along in the new normal while the bratty kids keep Calvinballing the rules as fast as they can. 

In the end, it's Tic Tac Toe, or Global Thermonuclear War. The only way to win is not to play.