Style wars

 
This isn't just another cautionary tale from the opinion pages of America's Newspapers®. Look a bit more closely and you'll find a familiar right-wing complaint: If you people in the media won't help us be a little more racist, it's going to go ill for you. Here's Douglas Murray in the New York Post:

If one of your allies starts to fall apart, you should notice it. And learn why.

This past week, Great Britain has been racked with riots and disorder. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics even came out to riot alongside each other for once.

At Fox News, corporate bedmate of the Post, this was "some of the worst unrest in the United Kingdom's history." (Oh, child.)

What has gone on has huge lessons for America. (Yes. And one of those lessons might be found in the proportion of Britons who turned out to say, in effect, we're not having any of that.) And our politicians here should take note.

The disorder in Britain began after three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were stabbed to death as they took part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. In the immediate aftermath, locals in Southport were shocked, angry and looking for someone to blame.

In the UK, as in America, the authorities do not just release information about suspects and culprits. They “manage” the release.

In Britain, as in America, if there is believed to be a racial component to a crime, the authorities are even more careful about what information comes out.

It might have been a while since Douglas Murray tended to the police beat. Neither Fox News nor the local affiliates that provide so much of its episodic crime coverage seem to have any trouble finding and publishing the ethnicity of crime suspects on short notice.

But the British public, like Americans, are used to this process. And the longer they sense information is being kept from them, the angrier they can get.

This time the authorities were clearly holding back something about the identity of the suspect. Soon rumors went around online. All from completely unreliable sources. But they caught on.

A rumor went around that the attacker was a Muslim who had only arrived recently with one of the illegal boatloads of migrants who keep pouring into southern Britain.

In fact, although there have been plenty of crimes and terrorism committed by illegals, this was not such a case.

This time, the person who carried out this appalling crime was the 17-year-old son of Rwandan migrants. His motive is not yet known.

See? It's all your fault, media. If only you'd told us it was a UK-born Black guy in the first place, we wouldn't have had to attack all those mosques and hotels!

Time out for the stylebook here. It's a widely accepted, if fairly recent, principle of style that matters like ethnicity and gender aren't supposed to be attached to people unless they're clearly relevant to the story. That implies a stylistic consistency that isn't there in real life: for example, the 1942 textbook that says, on one page, "it does no good to mention under certain circumstances that a Negro committed assault," then a few chapters laters offers NEGRO ATTACKS WIFE as an example of how to cram the "essentials" into a tight headline count.

As with many style points, knowing the rule isn't nearly as interesting as figuring out who gets to break it under what circumstances. Your shop might have a firm rule that it's not a "miracle" until God confirms it by phone*, but everybody knows which Star Reporter can blow past that stop sign without mussing a hair. More relevant are the examples that "everyone" understands because they meet the Man Bites Dog rule of tabloid days; that's why "male nurse" and "female drunken driving suspect" still populate the general news pages, and why, in the right-wing press, the headline tells you to blame a "nonbinary Biden official," not one of the boring old binary ones.

Now, it's not always the cops', or the press's, job to prove the negative. When the mob knows damn well it was nine-legged Muslim ammonia beings from Planet Mxyzptlk because it says so RIGHT HERE ON MY PHONE, they probably have other things to do (putting out fires, for example) than tell you "nah, it's a Black guy from some unspellable place in Wales." So in a way, following a rule -- even once it's been overtaken by the commonsense idea that the "complete physical description"** of stylebooks gone by is irrelevant when the perp is already in custody -- is beside the point. Our columnist has a bigger point in mind: 

But all this happened in a very dangerous context. And it is one that American politicians would do well to understand. Even if their British counterparts fail to.

In the UK — perhaps even more than in America — there is great dislike of the rule-breaking illegal migration.

... The authorities house the illegals in hotels (sound familiar?), and in short, absolutely nothing is done to punish people for breaking the law by breaking into the country.

Put a Smokey Bear hat, some mirrored sunglasses and a dime-store Southern accent on Douglas Murray, in short, and you can almost hear him saying "Reckon he done stole more chains than he could swim with."

* Or a "tragedy" unless someone kills their stepdad by the fifth act. I've got a million of 'em. Don't forget your server, folks!
** The idea here was that if it wouldn't help the cops, or the public, identify the baddies-at-large, it was irrelevant. As an editor I used to work for put it, "two Black men with sticks" doesn't count.

'Acceptable in all references'

The AP's style announcement today (actually several, so go view the whole thread) is a big deal --not just because of the AP's outsize influence on US news language, but because that influence has reflected the AP's historically conservative approach pretty much forever. Here are a few highlights of how the world has looked through the AP's eyes over the years:

1970: The courtesy title "Mr." is to be used "only with Mrs., or with clerical titles."
1977: "Use black or Negro, as appropriate in the context, for both men and women. Do not use Negress."
1980: "Black" is "acceptable in all references for Negro."
1986: "Native American" should not be used for American Indians because their ancestors "migrated to the continent over a land bridge from Asia."('86 was a momentous year at the Stylebook; women could appear in news stories without courtesy titles; "Dark Continent" was no longer a synonym for "Africa," and "paddy wagon" vanished altogether.)
1994: "Gay" is "acceptable as popular synonym for both male and female homosexuals."
2002: "Sharia" becomes "strict Islamic law" (and picks up a distinction that doesn't exist IRL: the tied-T is marked on adjectives but not nouns). It goes back to being "Islamic law" in 2003.

By "conservative approach" I don't mean "molasses that voted for Goldwater," and I certainly don't mean to slight the excellent work the AP is doing these days applying a just-the-facts approach to the rantings of the White House and its armed propaganda wing. The AP has always had a broad range of contributors and a broad range of users.* The earliest edition of the Stylebook I have is from 1960 (the year AP and UPI started collaborating on a common stylebook), and it notes that the AP had been working for years on ways to provide copy "more nearly conforming with majority usage and thereby make use of TTS tape efficient to the maximum degree": if you don't have to re-keystroke the copy, you cut a step out of the production process. On the user end, the same text is going to the big-city dailies as to the mom-and-pop daily in Kansas. Well beyond the era of hot type, if the New York Herald-Gazoo didn't want courtesy titles for women and the Emporia Democrat-Republican did, it was easier for the H-G to take them out than for the D-R to put them in.**

Style is also one of the main markers of objectivity: when you're citing a "precise" or "specific" usage, as in those non-Native Americans whose ancestors are really Asian, you're deferring to an outside authority rather than imposing your fallible judgment. It's unusual for stylebooks to go as far as the Guardian's "Our use of language should reflect not only changes in society but the newspaper's values"; the default is to decide that you're reflecting the world as it is.

My perspective, should you want it: Good for the AP. I think this was overdue, though I'd also point out that owning an AP Stylebook doesn't mean you have to follow it into the ground. If you've been holding off on a sensible decision on organizational style because the Journalist's Bible tells you so, stop it. You won't hurt the AP's feelings.

Now let's all sit back and wait to see what happens when Fox News hears about this -- given that the AP's 2013 decision to stop using "illegal immigrant" (which the Stylebook had mandated over "undocumented worker" in a 2008 entry) was worth a lead story at the Fox homepage.

* With a lot of overlap; the AP is a co-op, after all. Raise your hand if you've ever chatted with the nearest buro at the end of a shift about which stories it wanted to pick up.
** The NYT had nearly 100 Linotypes around the time the first reference-size edition of the  AP Stylebook came out in 1977. You make the call!

The detainee of Zenda

Dear CNN: Given that your own coverage from earlier in the day referred to the prisoner as a "prisoner," is there some particular reason you thought "detainee" was the appropriate term for a hed on the verdict? That's some Fox-level pandering:

 ... though even Fox manages to call him a "prisoner" today. (Fox does get some sort of prize for using "detainee" in the lede of one trial story while quoting a witness as saying "prisoner" in the second graf.)

If you retain some fear from the second Bush presidency that "prisoner" had some specific meaning that ruled out those captured on the battlefield, or those held behind barbed wire in what you describe as a "prison yard":

... it's time to get over it.

In today's story, there would have been nothing wrong with "captive." Or "ISIS fighter." Or "captive ISIS fighter." Any of them could alternate with, or substitute for, "prisoner" with no risk of Elongated Yellow Fruit syndrome. But "detainee" should have been out of bounds in 2001, and it's far out of bounds now.

Elongated grammatical pastries

Two things are always true about Paczki Day in Detroit:

1) The local fishwrap will be at pains to remind you that "paczki" is plural and that you should NEVER EVER use it as a singular
2) It's going to be a footrace of a slugfest of a grand slam dunk of a Hail Mary to see what gets to the finish line first, singular "paczki" or the Elongated Yellow Fruit. And it's close again this year:

 There's another one in the cutline, if you're scoring along at home: "adds butter to a paczki." (Previous paczki whinges here, here and here.)

It's nice, in a way, to observe distinctions like paczek/paczki. I'm almost tempted to call it quaint, except that questions about when foreign words get to retain their own plurals and when we assign them whatever we like can turn into larger social issues before we quite realize it. If you're going to maintain that "paczki" is only and always a plural, though, you might want to assign the same person to read all components of the display with that idea in mind. You could call that person -- I don't know, a copyczker or something.

'Twas a famous (victory)

You can kind of get an idea from the background who the "neighbors" are:

At St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Detroit, worshipers gathered Sunday for an unusual tradition: a prayer service for the Tigers as they embark on a new season.

We love a good Opening Day tradition around here. The complaint is with how the minister's quote is rendered:

“We understand that God does not take sides, most likely,” Kelly said. “But we at least want God to know that we’d like to see a lot of (victories) this year.”

OK. I think it's a fair bet that, as a man of the cloth, the parenthetical (victories) isn't replacing some George Carlin-level naughtiness. It probably isn't replacing "wins," either. Let's go out on a limb and guess that Rev. Kelly said "W's," and that was deemed too complicated for anyone seeing a picture of the ballpark and reading a story about the "Pray Here for the Tigers" service, and there you are.

To paraphrase a comment from Bill Walsh's fine talk at the ACES conference last week: Sometimes you have to put down the stylebook and think. You can have a rule for first references and still credit your audience with enough brains to figure out who "Obama" is if his first appearance is in a quote; there's a point at which (President Barack) is pedantry at the expense of clarity.*

Speaking of the stylebook:

This "Pray Here for the Tigers" service has been an annual pre-opening day tradition. While players and managers have come and gone, the service has persisted.

... an entry for "Opening Day" would keep you from having to worry about getting all the hyphens into "pre-opening-day." (It isn't, after all, a day that's pre-opening; it's an event that occurs before Opening Day.) And -- ahem -- "opener" (not "open") is a perfectly good baseball noun for "first game in a series," and it's Tigers', possessive, home opener, and all sorts of other things you could be doing besides your (victory) dance.

* "Clarity > pedantry" actually came from an equally awesome talk by Laura M. Browning and Marnie Shure of the Onion empire.

Peever and peeveress He created them

How are things on the Get Off My Lawn front over at The Journalist's Bible?

Q. Is it permissible (by today's rules) to start a sentence with "And"? – from Vancouver, Wash. on Thu, Nov 05, 2015

A. Yes, but avoid overusing that phrasing.

Apparently we're not going to set this one to rest without appealing to a Higher Power, so -- how about it, Creator of Heaven and Earth?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
 
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

OK, so it takes the almighty all of two verses to drop a coordinating conjunction on an independent clause. Surely He wouldn't overuse that phrasing, would He?

• And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.*
• And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
• And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
• And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
• And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
• And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Calm down, ye peevers, and notice a few things God didn't do. "It's official: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," for example. The gloves goeth not on, the gloves cometh not off, and Christmas cometh not early (though -- spoilers! -- that's a plot point in the sequel). But if your question is whether "today's rules" allow you to begin a sentence with "and," the answer is: Yes, and they have ever since "today's rules" meant Shakespeare. And you could look it up, but you (and the AP editors) probably have better stuff to do.

* I know it's traditional to number the verses, but bullets would have looked better on the PowerPoint

Calm down, AP

Q. Which sentence is correct? "When that happens, it can look like one is stepping on the others' toes." Or: "When that happens, it can look like one is stepping on the other's toes." – from Liverpool, N.Y. on Mon, Sep 28, 2015

A. The second.

Along with "did you look it up?" and "no, really -- did you look it up?" and "whichever you want," let's suggest another stock answer for Ask the Editor questions: "Yes."

Maybe more precisely: "Both, but they're each correct about a different thing. Which one did you have in mind?" The first has you (sorry, "one") stepping on more than one set of toes; the second has only one other to worry about the toes of.

The Stylebook doesn't actually have to rule on every question that comes down the pike. It's kind of the editors not to make fun of the really silly ones, but they'd give a better impression of their work -- and avoid turning the study of "style" into a nightmare of random choices -- if they discarded a few of them and gave more sensible answers to others. And yes, "that's not a style question" is a fine answer, too.

VIII score and seven years ago

How about those Roman numerals, Ask The Editor?

Q. The Roman numerals entry doesn't make clear AP's stance on movies. Would it be "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" or "Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope" or "Star Wars Episode Four: A New Hope"? – from New York on Wed, Jul 01, 2015

A. Star Wars: Episode VIII

Thanks for clearing that up.

Style reminders

A few style reminders as the weekend draws to a close. We've been over some of these before, but just in case:

The term for a female doctor is "doctor"
The term for an adopted daughter is "daughter"
The term for a gay marriage is "marriage"

Questions?

And one more thing:

The group on the left is the Supreme Court. The group on the right is the Supremes. Please take note of this distinction when writing headlines for a grownup audience.

These rules apply in my shop. You are, of course, free to write your own. If you don't like the advice, ask the boy at the front desk about our money-back guarantee.

I'm not asking you who's on second

Q. Is it third base line or third baseline? For example: Our seats were on the third base line. – from Des Moines, Iowa on Thu, Jun 11, 2015

A. It's baseline in the "baseball" entry, so make it third baseline.

It may be "baseline" in the baseball entry, but it's "third-base line" in real life for the same reason a businessman who runs a small business is a "small-business man" (I'm looking at the 1986 edition under "s"). The compound can't do its magic if it isn't a compound. You're not even being inconsistent -- this is what compounds do to reduce ambiguity. (A book written for schoolchildren in the primary grades is written for ...)

If your seats are behind the third-base dugout (not the third basedugout), you're along the baseline that goes from home to third, which is the first baseline if you're going left to right but the second baseline if you're counting right to left. So who decided to go with "third baseline"? I don't know.

Hyphens: Ur still doin it wrong

Q. Should "square foot" be hyphenated when used in front of a noun. For example "a 100 square-foot covered porch..." – from thornton, Pa. on Sat, Feb 21, 2015

A. Correct.

Partially correct at best -- yes, "square foot" should be hyphenated, but AP style also says pretty clearly that compounds of numbers and dimensions are hyphenated before nouns they modify. If you should hyphenate "the 5-foot-6-inch man" and "the 5-foot man" (pp. 76), you'd certainly want to hyphenate the whole of "100-square-foot covered porch." Why would the rule go away just because "square foot" is two words? After all, the "hyphens" entry itself says "use hyphens to link all the words in the compound except the adverb very and all adverbs that end in -ly" (p. 292).

"The fewer hyphens, the better" is the wrong way to go about setting up a rule. What you want is the right number of good hyphens and no bad hyphens. If that means you write "ice cream cone" on one page and "ice-cream-cone-shaped UFO" on another, fine. That's not inconsistent; it's consistent about avoiding foolish consistency.

Three decade-old zombie rules

Q. Which is correct: The 20-million-year-old scroll or the 20 million-year-old scroll? – from Tucson, Ariz. on Fri, Feb 20, 2015

A. The second, though prehistoric dates are better phrased without a compound modifier: an object estimated to be 20 million years old. That long predates humans so it couldn't be a scroll.

With respect to our friends at Ask the Editor (who, to their great credit, introduce the annual revisions to the gospel in front of a room full of rabid style nerds, which takes no small amount of sand) -- no. That's just wrong, and it's wrong on a lot of levels, so stop it before you do any more damage to the cause of style.

AP style, like many, exempts number compounds of the million, billion and percent flavor from the general rule on hyphenating preposed modifiers -- reasoning, quite sensibly, that "$7.82 billion budget" and "4 percent increase" simply don't create the sort of ambiguity you get from "man eating blancmange" vs. "man-eating blancmange." The problem comes when the little compound turns into a bigger compound: in the example I still use in class, when a dozen photos taken 20 or so years ago become "two decade-old photos." It's charitable to call that one ambiguous; the word you want is "wrong."

You could always write a rule that says "use hyphens to be clear" and count on the grownups in the room to figure it out on the fly. They generally do, but human beings -- especially copy editors -- are rule-loving creatures. If you're going to write a hyphen rule, write one that isn't likely to paint you into a corner: "Hyphenate the whole damn compound."

While you're at it? "Prehistoric" doesn't seem like a very intuitive cutoff point for when a bunch of numbers ought to be clumped into a compound. And if you think something couldn't be a scroll because it predates humans and their silly artifacts, you haven't been paying attention.

Yes and no, but no, and yes. And no.

Q. Hello. How would you write "a drugmaker that makes generic drugs": "generic-drug maker," "generic-drug-maker" or something else? Thanks. – from Tustin, Calif. on Thu, Sep 18, 2014

A. The Stylebook spelling is drugmaker, so the first is correct.

Dear AP: You're at least partly right about something, though not about what the questioner asks or even entirely about what you answer. The question from Tustin appears to be about how to shorten the phrase by preposing "generic drugs," not about whether the longer form is already correct-ish. You could instead be raising consciousness about why "generic-drug maker" is an exception to the Stylebook's spelling of "drugmaker."

What we want to avoid is letting the Stylebook drag us into doing something stupid -- making the drugmaker, rather than the drugs, generic, in the same sort of way careless writers turn women who run small businesses into teeny-tiny businesswomen.You don't want the adjective to modify the compound noun: small businesswoman, generic drugmaker. What you want is a compound modifier, and you're going to link it up just the way Tustin suggested: small-business woman, generic-drug maker. Or you can just use the longer form: A maker of generic drugs, women who run small businesses. And if someone wails that you're not being consistent, you should respond: At least I'm not being dumb.

Feral style

What happens when a stylebook is raised without human contact? Here's the owner of the Blue Note, telling Collegetown's afternoon daily why he's selling:

“Six years ago, I seriously considered some of the offers,” including one from Gerding and Leslie, “but I just wasn’t ready. I haven’t always wanted to admit it, but after my” heart-valve “surgery” in 2012, “there was a serious change in how I looked at everything. So, honestly, the timing is great.”

Doesn't your head just bob up and down as the quote stops and starts and stops and starts again? That's because somebody followed the rule -- no parentheses to clarify a quote, ever! -- without considering its impact on people who are trying to read the thing.

It's easy to overdo the parenthetical clarification thing, but it's usually just as easy to write around the problem. You could, say, break the quote:

"I haven’t always wanted to admit it, but after my surgery" -- King had heart valve* surgery in 2012 -- "there was a serious change in how I looked at everything. So, honestly, the timing is great.”

Or, if you want to keep the comma after the adverb phrase, you can put the clarifying sentence after the quote:

"I haven’t always wanted to admit it, but after my surgery, there was a serious change in how I looked at everything. So, honestly, the timing is great.” King had heart valve surgery in 2012.

OK, what if you have to add something because style demands clarity? Well, it probably doesn't need as much help as you think. If your sporting readers can handle a lede like:

It isn’t the crackling, late-moving fastball that will earn Max Scherzer gobs of money this winter. It’s his brain.

... without being reminded that Scherzer is a pitcher, and he plays for the Tigers, who play baseball, your general audience probably doesn't need a clarification on the order of "(State) Sen. (Roscoe P.) Coltrane (R-Greenville) needs to talk directly to the people." If you don't see a place within a few sentences to log in the details, ur doin it wrong anyway.

* No, you don't need to hyphenate this compound.

Today in 'Ask the Editor'

Q. I am writing material that requires Imperial dimensions with parenthetical metric dimensions. Would I write "the 60-foot-tall (20-meter) tree" or "the 60-foot (20-meter) tall tree"? – from Charlotte, N.C. on Sun, Feb 23, 2014

A. The 60-foot-tall (20-meter) tree ...

Dear Charlotte: Neither of the above. A 60-foot tree is about 18.3 meters (18 if you use the feet-to-meters conversion on page 170 of your AP Stylebook, which is a little less accurate than its meters-to-feet counterpart).

Practically, your audience is likely to default to height if that's the only number you mention, so "the 60-foot (18.3-meter) tree" would be fine. But if your style is picky enough to demand both measurements, it's picky enough to tolerate a little arithmetic and a decimal point.

That seems to be the least of your problems

Today in "Ask the Editor":

Q. Which is the correct use of the pronoun WHO and WHOM? I understand that who is used for subjects and who for objects of a sentence. But for this case, I am confused since I am writing in the passive voice. Is it Who or Whom that goes after the name Rachel Rosen? "I was referred to you through a mutual friend, Elizabeth Lewis, WHO or WHOM I met through Couchsurfing." Thanks so much.

It's exceptionally polite of David and the gang to answer "whom," rather than, say, "Why would the answer be any different if you'd written in the active voice?" Or, even more to the point: "Where did Rachel go?"

Stopses and friskses

Q. What is the plural of "stop-and-frisk" when referring to multiple searches under that policy? Is it "stop-and-frisks," "stops-and-frisks," or "stops-and-frisk?" – from Storrs, Conn. on Mon, Aug 12, 2013

A. On first reference, stop, question and frisk policies or actions. On second reference, AP uses the shorter form, stops.

Some days it's hard to see how our friends at the AP even open the e-mail without dissolving in howls of derisive laughter (stopses and friskses, gollum gollum gollum). Really? "The latest in a series of stops-and-frisk involved a delivery driver bringing an order of Whoppers Junior to the inspectors general"? Still, it's a chance to let a style question produce a suggestion or two about style sanity, which is why the AP's answer is so useless.

Nobody in the editing audience would be surprised to find that the AP doesn't read its own stylebook. Or, probably, that the AP doesn't even read its own copy, because the answer above -- like it or not, and I don't -- bears no resemblance at all to what the AP actually does. Today's lede (filed well after the question was posted) is one example: 

NEW YORK (AP) -- The nation's largest police department illegally and systematically singled out large numbers of blacks and Hispanics under its controversial stop-and-frisk policy, a federal judge ruled Monday while appointing an independent monitor to oversee major changes, including body cameras on some officers.
 
That sentence would produce a sensible style rule: A preposed compound modifier that needs a conjunction -- "your sink-or-swim attitude really yanks my chain" -- probably ought to be hyphenated. (The clumsy NP "stop, question and frisk actions" is, thankfully, pretty rare, and at a quick Lexis glance, doesn't show up in AP texts at all.) But the AP isn't doing very well at settling on a style, as illustrated by this first-reference plural from May 3:
Read more »

Cockatoo-shaped landmass

Your attention is drawn again to the Guardian stylebook, specifically its entry under "Pov":

term coined by a Guardian journalist to depict laboured attempts to produce synonyms by writers seeking what Fowler called "elegant variation" (and Orwell "inelegant variation"), often descending into cliche or absurdity. Thus Dalí becomes "the moustachioed surrealist" and Ireland "the cockatoo-shaped landmass". Pov, incidentally, stands for "popular orange vegetable"  

Two questions:
1) What do you yell across the newsroom when you have a winner in the weekly competition? Is it a "povv," a "pove" or a "P-O-V"?
2) At risk (or in hope) of stirring another conversation among our UK colleagues, shurely shome lesser rank of nobility is in order for the anonymous "Guardian journalist" to whom this contribution is credited?

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.
Read more »

How about 'neither'?

Sometimes our friends at the AP forget what century we're in:

Q. When writing about a female physician, do I say female doctor/physician or woman physician/doctor. – from Grapevine, Texas on Thu, Jun 27, 2013
A. Use female as the adjective.

Your fallback rule here, kids, is "neither." If you wouldn't point out that a boy doctor (or lawyer, or bus driver, or statistician) is a boy, why does it seem necessary to get a case of the vapors over a girl doctor (or lawyer, or bus driver, or statistician)?

It's possible, under some unusual but un-rule-outable circumstances, that you might have to point out a story subject's gender. If that isn't evident from the given name,* imagine how quickly a pronoun might make things clear. Your goal, of course, is to make sure it doesn't make clear that something besides your taste in music is still stuck in the 1960s.

* Congratulations here to the NYT stylebook, whose usage examples are all Lees and Terrys and other indeterminate names.