Over time the Associated Press Stylebook acquired quite a number of barnacles on the hull. In recent years its chief editor, Paula Froke, has careened the vessel to clean and calk below the waterline. Now she announces that she is taking a buyout and retiring after four decades with the AP.
It is not just little stuff that the stylebook cleaned up during her editorship (but we will be getting back to that). There have been annual updates on sensitive subjects such as racism and sexuality, and the current edition has an excellent selection of tips on self-editing.
But I am particularly grateful for a number of changes she and the editors approved after extensive prodding from me. Let's not mince around; I have been no better than a common scold.
AP and Chicago have both recently come to accept, however grudgingly, singular they.
AP deleted the entry on collide/collision after determining that there is no warrant for the bogus rule that only objects in motion can collide, that an object in motion cannot collide with a stationary object. Step onto to any street in Baltimore and watch it happen.
AP now acknowledges, despite Strunk and White, that hopefully can mean both "in a hopeful manner" and "it is hoped." Hopefully, we can abandon that canard.
She announced, to a chorus of moans from participants in an editors conference, that AP was dropping the over/more than distinction. Those of you who are not journalists should understand that the belief that over must refer to spatial relationships, never to quantities, is a distinction apparently invented by nineteenth-century American newspaper editors and upheld as an article of faith by American journalists ever since. It exists nowhere else in the English language. (No need to comment with your objection to the change; your protest has been noted.)
But my gratitude to her reached its zenith the day she announced that AP was deleting the "split verb" entry from the stylebook. Some of you probably understand that the split infinitive bugaboo is entirely a superstition, thoroughly demonstrated by the Blessed Henry Watson Fowler a century ago. Some unknown would-be precisionist decided that the split infinitive superstition should be extended to verbs with auxiliaries: that Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle should have been We Always Have Lived in the Castle. (If the latter construction does not look strange to you, you have likely been reading newspapers, and may not have noticed the split verb in this sentence.)
Paula Froke has allowed me to believe that a stylebook need not be an obstacle to good and informed writing. I hope she will accept this billet-doux and speed into retirement to do whatever the hell she would like to do. She has done the Lord's work.
