August 17, 2003

attaining style

The BBC has a styleguide, as it should. Although, strange as it may seem, the word styleguide itself doesn't seem to have an entry in either the American Heritage or the Merriam-Webster dictionaries. The OED gives style-book and cites its use in the US in 1911. Styleguide seems to be a minor variant of style guide. The former gets 86.6 thousand hits in Google, while the latter gets 1.36 million. The style guide itself is what you'd expect, but here's a few things that caught my eye:

  1. "One of the things which most exercises our listeners and viewers is our use of words and constructions which we are accused of slavishly copying from the United States." p. 19.
  2. "When the MP Alan Clark famously used the phrase economical with the actualité, he intended a fancy version of economical with the truth. But actualité in French does not mean truth, it means the present, current affairs or topicality. Even though it is wrong, the Clark version sounds good to English ears and is still frequently repeated." p. 47.
  3. "Assassination should be kept for the violent deaths of royalty and seriously prominent members of society, such as political or religious leaders. Everyone else is murdered or killed." p. 68.

[via Colin at Blogalization via Netlex]

Posted by jim at August 17, 2003 09:27 AM | TrackBack
Comments

strange as it may seem, the word styleguide itself doesn't seem to have an entry

Well, that would be because it's not a word. "Porkchop" doesn't have an entry either. It's true that many common collocations become single words (it happened to baseball a long time ago and is happening to website now), but I seriously doubt it will happen to "style guide," which is used exclusively by the sort of people who do not innovate in running words together.

Posted by: language hat on August 17, 2003 06:17 PM

I don't know, Steve. It seems like a slippery slope to me. In lieu of an academy, who decides when a collocation gels and becomes a compound? The question from a descriptivist POV is why people would insist on writing porkchop or styleguide, but not noodlesoup or ballpeenhammer. The later, which I learned from my father who was a journeyman carpenter, must be spelled ball peen hammer, since only ball, peen, and hammer are words listed in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate. I've never heard of any other kind of peen hammers or just a plain old peen hammer. Ball-peen hammer looks better to me. As for basketball, stickball, football, and baseball: were they ever written as two words?

Posted by: jim on August 17, 2003 06:51 PM

Oh, yes. "Base ball" in the early 19th c., "base-ball" in the later, finally run together for good. History is a great guide to perspective in these matters. I don't know of anyone who does write "porkchop," I just made that up as an analogy to "styleguide," which is also two words. If it's not in the dictionary as one word (hyphenated or not), it's two words. The reasons have little or nothing to do with linguistics, but if you accept that there's any virtue to uniformity in written representation, you have to allow these decisions to be made for you, and in the English-speaking world they're ultimately made by copy editors and not (thank god) by any sort of Academie.

Posted by: language hat on August 18, 2003 01:47 PM

Although I have seen baseball spelled as one word back to the early 20th century, "base ball" was still two words in official Baseball Guides until 1942!

I am curious to know when it "officially" became one word.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Bill Swank

Posted by: Bill Swank on August 24, 2003 06:25 PM
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