Hunting for rogue apostrophes in the land of the Queen’s English

I went on holiday in London earlier this summer and revisited all my favourite British things. I took a selfie in a red phone booth, watched Glastonbury on the BBC with a sleeve of digestives, and spent many hours happily perusing the bookshops of Charing Cross Road.

For most editors, the enthusiasm for language runs even deeper than a desire to shop for first editions: we are never not aware of language and tend to edit the world around us constantly. I enjoyed listening to the conversations on transit—it seems like even working class Brits’ vocabularies are four times the size ... keep reading


New guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style are an enlightened step forward

This week the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) announced the changes that will be made to its upcoming new edition, which comes out in September. As an editor, a publisher, and a progressive idealist, I am applauding one of those changes in particular: approval of the use of the singular pronoun they.

The English language is one of the most shape-shifting languages in the world. Every year, English speakers add new words to the lexicon and repurpose old ones. Some of these innovations are widely adopted and become part of the language; others fall by the wayside. Ther... keep reading