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.

Comma tips.

Today I would like to once again address the pressing issue of commas in the English language. 

And no, I'm not going to take up once more the battle of the serial comma (also known as the Oxford comma) -- that is, the comma before the last item in a series. (As in the sentence I bought bananas, apples, and oranges.) There are those who believe the serial comma should be used in such sentences, and there are those who are wrong. I'm not debating the wrong people at this time. 

No, in this case I have a couple of tips for comma use that will make your writing sing! Or, if not sing, at least look neater, which will still put you ahead of the game. 

1) Use commas with independent clauses.

Bob got out his motorcycle, and Jan got out her AK-47.

A comma usually proceeds the conjunction (sing it with me: and, but, and or, get you pretty far! And also yet, while, so, etc.) when there are independent clauses. What does this mean without the grammar blah blah blah? When you see a sentence with multiple subjects and their verbs, and you have a boxcar from Conjunction Junction, break out your comma. 

Failure to do so is the number-one cause of run-on sentences, according to a statistic I just made up. It makes you sound unschooled, or someone like Big Bill Faulkner or Winston Groom or T. R. Pearson pretending to be unschooled.

Then Jolie and me went to the bait shop and I bought bait and she said what's that for and I said lunch and she didn't think it was funny.

Of course that should be: Then Jolie and me went to the bait shop, and I bought bait, and she said what's that for, and I said lunch, and she didn't think it was funny. Although if you were writing a business letter like this, you would need to make plenty more changes. 

One thing that can alert you is the change of point-of-view. In the top example we have Bob and Jan doing different things, with individual verbs and objects. When it's just one subject with that conjunction, you won't need the comma. 

Bob got out his motorcycle and gunned the engine.

2) How to tell when to use a comma for a coordinate adjectives. 

Here are some simple nouns with multiple adjectives. Can you tell why some have commas and some don't?

lovely cold water

green, hazy morning

sharp, shiny blade

hard, cold truth

blue wooden basket

The simple answer is that in the first and last examples, the first adjective modifies the noun and the adjective before the noun. It is because the water is cold that it is lovely; it is the wood of the basket that is painted blue. A hazy morning is not necessarily green, a blade not always shiny, and the truth not always cold. Think of "cold water" and "wooden basket" as being the name of the object.  

But Fred, you say, this is very subtle. If only there were an easy way to tell when to use the comma and when not to use the comma!  

And there is! When looking at multiple adjectives before a noun, ask yourself, Self! Would the phrase work as well if I used and between the adjectives? If so, use the and or use the comma. Sharp and shiny blade is the same as sharp, shiny blade. Lovely and cold water is not the same as Lovely cold water because in the first instance, the loveliness is not connected to the refreshingly chill of the water. Maybe the water just looks nice. But hard and cold truth is fine, because that truth is both hard and cold. 

The Chicago Manual of Style gives less subtle examples as: 

He has rejected traditional religious affiliations.

You can see that traditional and religious affiliations would change the meaning, saying that he has rejected all traditional as well as all religious affiliations. So he eschews the Masons and Oddfellows and Knights of the Templar as well as Judaism and Catholicism and New Age woo woo stuff. 

, , , , , , , , ,

Ninety-nine people out of a hundred will not pick up on these things and will not care. Some will sense something is off if a comma is not used properly. Many can scarcely read or write, yet somehow got a high-school degree. I saw someone online complaining about the noise from the "canyons" being shot off at West Point. Maybe another victim of autocorrect... or maybe not.

I admit my comma issues are real inside-baseball stuff. 

Some will argue that these are not hard-and-fast rules, set in stone, and other clichés, and that's all right. Certainly great writers have broken these kinds of guidelines all the time, often showing powerful style. But as a great editor once said, you need to know the rules before you can break them. You have to pass the basic driving test before you can go on to race cars, drive big rigs, or jump school buses in Beetles, and what I offer is the equivalent of a parallel parking tip. 

Now, go out there and use those commas! Or not, depending! 

Knock off the single quotes!

I have just been through a manuscript with a lot of inappropriate single quotes. Now, I'm not one to shame singletons in general; standalone items and persons are perfect the way they are, and do not require a twin to be made complete. However, standalone quotation marks in inappropriate places are a black mark, or lack of one, and something up with which I shall not put. 

Single quotes -- and here I'm not discussing apostrophes -- are seldom used in American English. We've settled on the double quotes for quoted material, as a means of setting off someone's words, and we like it that way. Single quotes are almost exclusively used for quotes within quotes.

"Hot damn," said Barney. "This morning Betty said, 'Get your lazy ass out of this house!' Can you believe it?"

The British do it the opposite way, which is their problem. 

'Blimey!' said Barnabus. 'This morning Betsy said, "Get your idle arse out of this house!" Can you imagine?'

The rule for single quotes goes as follows, and I quote from the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (chapter 13, verse 30): 

Quoted words, phrases, and sentences run into the text are enclosed in double quotation marks. Single quotation marks enclose quotations within quotations; double marks, quotations within those, and so on.

The problem, however, is that all of a sudden people -- and here I'm referring to professional writers -- seem to think that if it was not said aloud, it doesn't get the double quotes. Like so:

Sam went for his gun, the gun he liked to call 'Boom Hilda' for some strange reason.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong. There are two better choices than single quotes in standard text before we even get back to the double quotes. Words as words (like the name Boom Hilda used in that sentence) may be italicized, or they may be given no special treatment at all. Chicago 7.63 says: 

When a word or term is not used functionally but is referred to as the word or term itself, it is either italicized or enclosed in quotation marks. 

You can argue that Boom Hilda is not really being used non-functionally and leave it alone, no italics or quotes. Or you can italicize it, which would be the preferred method in books. Or, if you were texting the sentence or otherwise dealing in a method that allows no italicization, you would use double quotes. But there's no call for single quotes here. 

Somehow, though, just in the last couple of years, I get these manuscripts in which people cannot bring themselves to use double quotes except for directly attributable speech. How did this happen? I blame COVID. 

Well, maybe not, but it happened around the same time. I think the real problem with the pandemic was that it made everyone stupider. But that's a much larger problem, and one for another day.