What about "Land Rover," "manhattan" (the cocktail) and "chowchow" (pickled vegetables), all of which are included in both the older and the revised manuals?
"Land Rover" is a constant problem because "Land Rover" and "Rolls-Royce" and others like them -- some of these take hyphens and some of them don't. And yeah, people gyrate crazily and guess about the hyphen.
How did "wannabe" ("the faddish slang of adults who, well, want to be teenagers") make it into the new volume?
A lot of our writers live in Manhattan and hang out with a hip crowd and try to use hip words. Some writers are influenced by people in other media -- such as advertising -- and it gets real tedious real fast.
Speaking of media, the manual's definition of media ["In discussion of news and information outlets, the word is meaningless when standing alone; politicians and publicity people have stretched it to embrace soap operas, talk shows, encyclopedias, technical journals and everything in between. And since the things in between include The Times, the discomfort of the embrace should be evident"] gives readers an idea of how the Times views itself. How did your sense of the Times inform the writing of the manual?
We think that our readers are, in many instances, better educated and, because of the work that they do, better informed, than we are. We are blessed with an extremely well-educated, accomplished, civic-minded readership. We're also blessed with -- and actively seek -- a lot of school circulation and regard among teachers, because they are the people who introduce newspaper readership to the next generation of newspaper readers. On certain litmus entries, we want to be acceptable to people who care about the language in a professional, clinical kind of way.
The new volume tolerates split infinities. Was that a difficult decision?
It wasn't a decision at all. We have long tolerated split infinitives and I don't think our position has changed in probably several editions.
"Queer" is the only exception allowed to the Times' no-slurs-
No. We make exceptions, occasionally, after discussion. But there is no other exception that regularly has a place in the paper.
We put "queer" in because we think the new usage of "queer" has taken it into a different dimension and that people would be too prone to striking it out automatically or unthinkingly if we didn't alert them that this word has another life.
What you have to realize about the way the paper comes out is that it is edited by literally hundreds of people at white heat. Stories are quite commonly still being written at 7, 8 and -- God help us! -- 9 at night, and they are on the street someplace a little after midnight. A lot of the time what a magazine writer would do in the way of going to a dictionary or going to a usage book, newspaper people just don't have the luxury of doing. The manual aims to be first and foremost for the people here who edit under what I call combat conditions. It has the things they really need to know in a hurry.
Until now employees, per the Times manual, could be "dismissed" from their jobs but not "fired." Now it's OK to fire someone from their job. What happened?
What happened happened a long time ago. I was, in a very much more junior capacity, one of the people who helped compile the 1976 version and I argued then that "fired" had made it into the language and was no longer colloquial or slang. I lost that argument but I lived to fight another day. This time I had the votes.
"Fired" is a nice short word for headlines, so one is always tempted to overuse it. But, there is no question about it: There is nothing colloquial or slangy about "fired." We should have accepted it a long time ago.
Was there pressure within the paper to allow words like "gay" and "Ms."?
"Gay" and "Ms." were admitted long, long ago. We went through an unfortunate gap between editions of the stylebook because we could never get our act together to redo it. But sometime in the '80s "Ms." was accepted, by memo. And "gay" probably sometime in the latter half of the '80s also. Was there pressure in the '80s? Sure there was, lots and lots and lots of pressure. But it hasn't been an issue here for a long time. The stylebook is just catching up with what we've been doing.
On what other sorts of words and usage has pressure been exerted?
From the experience of "Ms." and "gay" and a few other things we lived through back then, we've gotten awfully good at heading off pressure. Many, many times in the last 10 years, people have asked me to take a stand on "black" vs. "African-American." I decided the republic would not fall if we did it both ways. And we did it both ways and the republic has not fallen.
Bobbing and weaving is not a bad editing technique. We're not in the pressure business here.
When Bill Connelly and I started this project, one of the first things we did was learn from other people's mistakes. The L.A. Times put out a stylebook that was ridiculed nationwide for what was seen as -- to use a word we don't encourage people to use -- political correctness. They retreated and have since redone the stylebook. We didn't want to be in that position.
Very early on we pulled together different panels of people from the newsroom, people who could speak for the interests and concerns of blacks, Latinos, people with physical disabilities and, believe it or not, Native Americans (in this organization, it wasn't easy finding them, but we found a few) and Asian-Americans, of which there was no shortage.
As an editor of a stylebook sitting with these people (who would never otherwise have assembled together), you had to wonder, "What are we unleashing here, what are we inviting in terms of pressure?" In fact, the people on our panel turned out to be really level-headed folks, which is another way of saying they are Times people as much as anything else that they are. They gave us a lot of very, very good ideas, many of which are reflected in this book. But they didn't press us to do anything that would make the language uncomfortable or awkward or artificial.
Your question was about pressure. There really hasn't been a lot of pressure here because there has been a lot of discussion, and discussion has obviated pressure.
