Style and clues

In that case, what's the point of the tweet? Formal titles are capitalized before names even when royalty aren't involved, and "Prince" would be capitalized as the first word of the sentence anyway, and there's no explanation at all of why "Duchess of Cambridge," which follows the name, is capitalized in violation of the "titles" entry (In general, confine capitalization to formal titles used directly before an individual's name).

It's probably too late to keep anybody from putting a story about royal families on the front page Wednesday,* but it is worth speculating on why such a tweet was considered relevant in the first place. I'd guess that AP was trying to explain why "Duchess" is capitalized after a name, which is explained under "nobility," rather than "titles," and that in itself suggests some entertaining things about AP style and style in general.

The "nobility" entry takes up more than a page and a half in the 2012 AP Stylebook. That's about twice as much room as the AP needs to explain "Islam" -- a substantial change from the dawn of the modern stylebook era in 1977, when "Islam" took all of four lines, or about a third of the size of the entry for "laetrile." Size isn't everything, but it is an indicator of what a stylebook thinks users need to, or should, talk about. The Guardian's 1928 stylebook has a detailed entry on "house servants," because, well, when the clock is running, you don't need to know why "housemaid," "kitchen-maid" and "children's maid" are rendered differently; you just need the rulebook.**

Some of the US press's bizarre fascination with the British royal family is of a piece with that, and given that it's no longer 1928, it hardly seems unreasonable to ask how much cognitive energy we still need to burn on the likelihood that any marquess, viscount or baron might also be identified as a lord. The less ideologically deranged of the two local papers proclaims each morning*** on page 2A that it corrects "all errors of fact," but it doesn't extend that concern to, say, the distinction between a head of state and a head of government, which -- unlike nailing the spelling of "marchioness" and "viscountess" -- actually has something to do with rolling out the bombs.

Editing is a craft of distinctions large and small, and I don't mean to suggest that your trivia are somehow lesser than mine. Nor am I implying some Whorfian spell under which the AP's obsession with stylistic details about the folks we -- bluntly -- kicked out of governance quite some time ago bears some linear relationship to our media's general cluelessness about the world around us. But I would like to suggest that the AP could be a little more helpful. Instead of bollixing a meaningless style tweet timed to the royal birth, try thinking about how much underbrush from the 1920s you could clear from the public agenda.

* Fun as it might be to speculate on what it would have taken to get the Belgian abdication into the paper at all.
** The distinction in parliamentary reporting between (Hear, hear) and (Cheers and "hear, hear") looks kind of arcane, but work with it.
*** It's still printed every day, though it only lands in the driveway three days a week.