The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [38]
Associated Press Stylebook says—you need to go back to Galveston and remove the superlative [sic … did they mean superfluous?] S.
I was perplexed at first by the criticism. I had expected everyone to agree that we’d left the Locker in a better state than we’d found it. But many of these people were acting as if we had done something wrong.* Why was everyone talking about AP? Had they confused me for a journalist? I realized, finally, that a couple of threads of misunderstanding were unspooling here.
I had been assuming that everyone was at least aware that stylistic rules of the language could vary depending on who was using them. But now it hit me—some people, like the writers of the first two comments above, were unaware that different style guides even existed. They thought that long ago, an overlord of the English language had, with a slam of his mailed fist upon some oaken table, definitively put all grammatical questions to rest. “Never end a sentence with a preposition,” quoth he, “and that is bloody that.”
How much I had taken for granted! Of course there’d be loads of people out there who had stopped thinking critically about grammar the day they escaped their last English teacher (the stand-in for that overlord from the misty past). Forget this, they said to themselves, I’m going to be a biochem major. If they were not bound for editorship, as I had been, they might never have had the occasion to consider the existence of—the necessity for—different approaches to the language. A journalist trying to squeeze a story into a newspaper column would naturally have different grammatical priorities from, say, a scholar writing up a journal article on the significance of the color green in Proust. The former will want her punctuation, abbreviation, and so forth to be as economical as possible. The latter will use his comma and quotation placement to elucidate his close textual analysis. So you give the journalist an AP Style Guide to inform her work, and you advise the scholar to use the MLA Handbook. Medical writers have still different needs, so they’ll find the APA Guide helpful, and so forth. Fiction and mainstream nonfiction writers will mostly turn to the Chicago Manual. In fact, the vast majority of books on the North American market are edited according to Chicago rules. A bibliophilic fellow such as myself would naturally gravitate toward such a style.
Which brings me to the other type of comments left in regard to the Davy Jones correction, the ones that chided me for not using AP style, of all things. This mentality is, in a way, more pernicious than simply not knowing about the plurality of style guides. Its proponents are aware that different rulebooks exist, but for whatever reason, they insist that one particular guide is king of all, and any others should be discarded. Consider this argument another wedge served from the malodorous pie known as “My Way Is Right,” the dessert of choice for politicians, religious leaders, and warring pastry chefs.
If some other marauder had gotten to the Locker first, and had chosen to make Davy Jones possessive per AP style, I would have no problem with that. TEAL is not about elevating one style guide over the other. The point is that any correction, regardless of the stylebook, is better than leaving the thing wrong. Whether it’s Davy Jones’s Locker or Davy Jones’ Locker, kindly acknowledge the fact that we have improved on “Davy Jones Locker.”
The one argument that I will consider was offered by someone claiming that Chicago also calls for withholding the extra s in the case of mythical figures (which probably pertains more to classical heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, but who knows, may extend to folk legends).* The rest of the angry commenters must clomp back to the Barony of the Trolls, where the Internet’s full-time instigators dwell.
In the morning we decided to make a stop or two in the little downtown of the island. Benjamin had discovered a flyer in