In an industry facing rumors of its obsolescence, one century-­old print publication is clinging to some standards while stepping forward into a digital future. The 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style was published last month, seven years after its last iteration. And though the 15th also had an online version, this edition is the first to be published simultaneously online and in print.

A quick history: In 1891, the staff at University of Chi­cago Press’s composing room (where “compositors” deciphered handwritten manuscripts from professors, then gave them to proofreaders to correct and edit for style) created a style sheet—a documentation of standards and editorial decisions about things like spelling and the use of hyphens and italics. It soon became a pamphlet and then a book. The first edition of the Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press, to which are appended specimens of type in use was published in 1906. By the 14th edition, the original 200 pages had expanded to 936—this latest edition exceeds 1,000.

While Chicago is indispensable for anyone working with words, the book can be a beast. (As a copy editor at The Stranger, I reference it regularly.) It’s big, it’s rife with intimidating words like predicate nominative, and until you wear a groove into the sections you’ll flip to over and over again, it can take some digging to find a simple answer. So the web version is a dream. Not only is the content easily searchable and hyperlinked, you can also bookmark sections, take notes, and create your own style sheets with links back to various rules.

Chicago provides simple solutions to recurring queries. The last edition was too wishy-washy for some, providing multiple options and leaving room for flexibility—commenters writing to Chicago‘s popular online Q&A complained that they just wanted to be topped, told what do in a definitive way from an authority in the field. So the 16th edition simplified some things.

But first, let’s review a couple neglected basics. There’s spelling—that’s easy: Use a fucking dictionary (if there are multiple spellings for a word, go with the first one). Chicago recommends Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (www.m-w.com). Then there’s grammar. Grammar is a code, a naturally occurring pattern beneath our words (spoken, signed, texted). There really isn’t such a thing as poor grammar, just a variety of contexts. And for the most part, our brains can decipher proper constructions—and code-switch between contexts—without instruction. But sometimes we get stuck. Is it Give the award to whoever runs the fastest or Give the award to whomever runs the fastest? (Pro tip: If you like math, break the sentence down into clauses and imagine that there are parentheses around the clauses—calculate the grammar within the parentheses first, then move outward. [Give the award to (whoever runs the fastest.)])

And then there’s style. The style of a text is hidden in its letters, its commas, its hyphens. The President said the war is over or The president said the war is over? The Stranger Genius Awards are in visual art, theater, literature, film and music or The Stranger Genius Awards are in visual art, theater, literature, film, and music? (Chicago gives a fuck about an Oxford comma.) Post-mortem or postmortem?

There is no correct answer here—it depends on which style you are using. And there’s an alphabet soup of styles to choose from: AP, APA, MLA, Turabian, and, of course, Chicago are among the most common. Most newspapers use AP (The Associated Press Stylebook, which is updated annually); most fields outside of newspaper journalism use Chicago. Magazines tend to use some combination of Chicago and AP. (Because The Stranger is a weekly and publishes long-form articles—and because we like it better—our house style is based on Chicago.)

For some of us, the publication of this edition is thrilling, with its new simpler organization (three sections now: “The Publishing Process,” “Style and Usage,” and “Documentation”), an expanded section on bias-free language (including a dis of age-old attempts at creating gender-neutral singular pronouns), a simply designed (and handy!) hyphenation table, and a brand-new index entry for blogs (directing readers to a questionable preference for casting blog names in italics). For others… well, Carol Fisher Saller—author of The Subversive Copy Editor (as well as a great blog of the same name) and one of the primary editors of the 16th edition—put it best to the Chicago Tribune: “There are two kinds of people in the world: There are those who could be given this book and not be able to put it down, and there are people who would, you know, rather slit their wrists than read it.”

If you’re still reading, you’re the former. Many of the changes hone previous overly complicated or cumbersome advice to a more simple, consistent style, and others are slowly catching up with modern spellings (like web instead of Web; though this edition still stubbornly retains the capping of Internet and the hyphen in e-mail). Other updates include the permission of multiple punctuation marks in certain contexts (Against Me!, Man or Astro-man?, and the Shins would be a crazy lineup), a revoking of the special treatment of possessive forms of names that end in an unpronounced s (René Descartes’s mind/body dualism was misguided), the hyphenation (when they precede a noun) of compound adjectives formed with color words (emerald-­green landscape, snow-white clouds), and the “geographic and cultural entity” of Northern California finally getting some respect, with Chicago now preferring to capitalize it (previously, only Southern California merited capitalization). There’s also an entirely new section on “Considerations for Web-Based Publications,” emphasizing things that most professional web designers have already systematized, namely the importance of a “clear and consistent navigational hierarchy.” One of the most helpful sections has unfortunately lost its Lemony Snicket–y name (formerly the “Glossary of Troublesome Expressions”)—now it’s the “Glossary of Problematic Words and Phrases.”

Even with new, simplified rules, there’s still plenty of wiggle room. As the editors have reminded us since the first edition: “Rules and regulations such as these, in the nature of the case, cannot be endowed with the fixity of rock-ribbed law. They are meant for the average case, and must be applied with a certain degree of elasticity.” Sometimes, Chicago outright tells writers to make shit up: “For [interjections] not found in the dictionary—or where a different emphasis is required—plausible spellings should be sought in literature or invented” (bee-yotch!). Over the years of editing linguistically, um, creative writers, The Stranger has compiled an extensive list of our own—words that haven’t made their way into Webster’s (or those that have but whose treatment we dislike): blowjob, babydaddy, buttfucking, come shot, douchebag, genderqueer, K-hole, and three-way, for example. And sometimes, to allow room for a writer’s unique voice (ahem, Lindy West and Wm.™ Steven Humphrey), a copy department can choose to disregard certain guidelines, like, say, section 7.48 (“Capitalizing an entire word or phrase for emphasis is rarely appropriate”).

For over one hundred years, The Chicago Manual of Style has been setting and defending stylistic standards. In a world where we often communicate with just our thumbs and publish our thoughts from 30,000 feet in the air, we need something to ground us, to solve the little problems, to give us answers we never knew we needed, and to make us beam (or scream) with solutions to the dilemma of the omitted antecedent of a relative pronoun. recommended

This story has been updated since its original publication

The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition

by University of Chicago Press
(University of Chicago Press, $65/$35 for a one-year online subscription)

25 replies on “Hyphenate This”

  1. Language is fascinating, and I can be a little of a grammar snob. What some nitpicks tend to forget is the important part of language is to be understood. Being overly proper in all occasions can detract from your being understood and take away the ‘status’ you’re trying to convey.
    It seems to me written language is becoming more vocally expressive, probably to do with the increasing reliance we have on communication through texts and blogs like this.
    Our grandparents may mourn the loss of the language they understood, but I’m sure their grandparents thought the kids of the 40’s spoke mumbo jumbo too.

  3. “Grammar is a code, a naturally occurring pattern beneath our words (spoken, signed, texted). There really isn’t such a thing as poor grammar, just a variety of contexts.”

    Thank you!

  4. Does the CMoS explain why are people using .75 cents and .09 cents for food item prices? I get flustered and feel I have to buy a multiple of the items to cleanly round up to cents, that is, four of a .75 cent advertised item to buy for three pennies, and 100 of the .09 cents item.

    This practice is so prevalent at farmers’ markets and at Trader Joe’s that there must be an American style guide. But I can’t see a formal reference for the intentional ambiguation between dollars and cents, and nobody has said “oh! That’s not right! That decimal point doesn’t belong there at all!”

  6. I do love Chicago Style, but I have a question about the new guide: has the committee decided how the Grove Dictionaries should be cited? (They’re collections of scholarly essays on music, art, architecture, etc.)

    While in grad school, the 15th ed. came out and didn’t address this type of citation, so I emailed and asked. The response was “why are you trying to cite a dictionary?”

  10. Capital “t” in The Stranger, but not the Shins? I think AP says no upper-case “t” for band names (which bothers me), does Chicago agree?

  15. Does the new edition give us permission to slap all of those “professional” writers who now insist on splitting their infinitives? If so, I have a list.

  16. cxg, you are slightly behind the times. Chicago says

    Although from about 1850 to 1925 many grammarians stated otherwise, it is now widely acknowledged that adverbs sometimes justifiably separate an infinitive’s to from its principal verb {they expect to more than double their income next year}.

    (5.106)

  17. Also, 5.168:

    Sometimes it is perfectly appropriate to split an infinitive verb with an adverb to add emphasis or to produce a natural sound… A verb’s infinitive or to form is split when an intervening word immediately follows to {to bravely assert}. If the adverb bears the emphasis in a phrase {to boldly go} {to strongly favor}, then leave the split infinitive alone. But if moving the adverb to the end of the phrase doesn’t suggest a different meaning or impair the sound, then it’s an acceptable way to avoid splitting the verb. Recasting a sentence just to eliminate a split infinitive or avoid splitting the infinitive can alter its nuance or meaning—for instance, it’s best to always get up early (always modifies get up) is not quite the same as it’s always best to get up early (always modifies best). Moreover, sometimes “fixing” a split infinitive makes the sentence sound unnatural, as in it’s best to get up early always.

  20. Hey Mr. Vernon (Hope you don’t find too many style or grammatical errors in this comment):

    Excellent article on what’s (unfortunately) become an obscure corner of our communications infrastructure. With the downsizing, “out-placing” and disregarding of the professionals (writers, editors, reporters, etc.) who assisted the evolution of our language-culture, I wonder what’s to become of the commonality we shared through the reading of newspapers and periodicals, and even the listening/viewing of broadcast journalism?

    When everyone’s writing freelance, will there be any accountability to language and style? And where editors are reduced to just laying out the page, will there be any grammar/style experts to rein in the discrepancies?

    English’s ability to constantly adapt and adopt will likely insure it maintains its preeminence as a world language, but I wonder, without its style/grammar gatekeepers, if English readers/speakers will eventually have any commonality whatsoever?

  21. Hey Mr. Vernon (Hope you don’t find too many style or grammatical errors in this comment):

    Excellent article on what’s (unfortunately) become an obscure corner of our communications infrastructure. With the downsizing, “out-placing” and disregarding of the professionals (writers, editors, reporters, etc.) who assisted the evolution of our language-culture, I wonder what’s to become of the commonality we shared through the reading of newspapers and periodicals, and even the listening/viewing of broadcast journalism?

    When everyone’s writing freelance, will there be any accountability to language and style? And where editors are reduced to just laying out the page, will there be any grammar/style experts to rein in the discrepancies?

    English’s ability to constantly adapt and adopt will likely insure it maintains its preeminence as a world language, but I wonder, without its style/grammar gatekeepers, if English readers/speakers will eventually have any commonality whatsoever?

  22. I don’t think it’s new to the 16th edition, but it also bears mentioning that, in addition to the split-infinitive myth, The Chicago Manual of Style also dismisses the whole fetish of never ending a clause with a preposition:

    The “rule” prohibiting terminal prepositions was an ill-founded superstition. Today many grammarians use the dismissive term pied-piping for this phenomenon.(5.176)

    Jesse Vernon seems to be among the few American journalists not terrified by mathematics. As one who has often been thwarted — yes, not “one who often has been thwarted” — by folks who spasmodically redline who and whoever whenever to is in the vicinity, I loved his explanation of how nested parentheses can be used to break up clauses.

    I’m getting the feeling Vernon may even be able to convert among percentages, fractions and decimal approximations without throwing off the result of a calculation by whole orders of magnitude.

    A rare gem, indeed! Bravo.

  23. Fascinating! I should have a look at this.

    By the way, I do support the nonhyphenated “email,” but I also think “Web” and “Internet” should be capitalized, as they are proper nouns meaning “the totality of resources accessible via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)” and “the global system of packet-switched computer networks using the Internet Protocol (IP), usually in conjunction with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP; the combination is called TCP/IP).”

    (I think my wonkiness just lapped itself.)

  24. Late to the table on this one, but thank you from the grammar nerds. I like NT’s comment about wonkiness lapping itself.

    Two more additions: William Safire’s grammar rules
    http://faculty.sanjuancollege.edu/krobis… and my favorite charity, The Apostrophe Protection Society of the UK http://www.apostrophe.org.uk.

    BTW, what is the convention for including a web address in a sentence? I just leave some space around it because I’m afraid that a comma might screw things up.

  25. @24 ellenziegler, in our journals we put < > around web addresses to make sure they are clear and that they are separated from a comma or period that might follow them. Not that anyone would think the comma or period was part of the web address, but it just looks better.

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