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The AP Stylebook: Learned Guide or Subversive Plot?

By Greg Coyle

The psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment in the 1960s to gauge the influence of authority. What he found was that by simply dressing up his experimenter in an official-looking white lab coat and relying on the reputation of Yale University (the site of the experiment) he could convince people to administer what they believed to be potentially fatal shocks to another person.

Why do I mention this? Well, I was recently reminded of Mr. Milgram and his experiment after a somewhat contentious discussion with a colleague about whether, typographically, a dash should or shouldn't be flanked by spaces.

Like some red-pen-wielding, grammarian thug, I found myself waving my tattered copy of the "AP Style Book and Libel Manual" at the offending person, citing chapter and verse with an almost indecent self-possession. It could've been a copy of Mao's little red book, "Mein Kampf" or the "Bridges of Madison County," the authority I invested in its pages.

So I got to thinking, who, or what, is behind this book, this Rosetta Stone of the editing world? Some shadowy quasi-governmental body operating out of the bowels of the Pentagon? The Masons? Ted Kaczynski?

According to Louis D. Boccardi, Associated Press president and CEO, and the author of the book's forward, it was a joint effort, the product of a semi-shared vision between members of the Associated Press and their industry kin around the country. But read further and you'll notice he doesn't name names. The credit is all very circumspect and elusive. And then what do we know about Mr. Boccardi anyway? Haven't I seen his name on leaked documents about Area 51?

The point is this, editors and proofers everywhere enjoy a level of intellectual despotism thanks to the manual, despite the fact that few, myself included, could've told you very much about its origins. Ask me, and I would've said it was found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. Or was the much-overlooked fifth book of the Gnostic Gospels. Wherever it came from, and from whosesoever hand it was penned, it presumes to define the standard for spelling and usage.

And we, those working in close quarter with words, it's left for us to goosestep in behind, saluting Mr. Boccardi and his minions.

On what specious authority does it presume such righteousness? When one begins, as I did after having been called to task by my aforementioned colleague (God bless her steely resolve and good sense!), to really inspect one's allegiance to the "AP Stylebook," it begins to look less like brick and mortar, and more like papier-mâché and wet Graham crackers. Consider the following. According to the good people behind the manual, we are to believe it's:

· ball point pen, not ball-point pen
· gunbattle, not gun battle
· cabdriver, not cab driver
· cross fire, not crossfire
· face lift, not facelift
· hide-out, not hideout
· chain saw, not chainsaw
· blue chip stocks, not blue-chip stocks
· officeholder, not office holder

We are also to expected to swallow that "pacemaker," and "cellophane," though once trademarked products, are no longer capitalized, while "Dumpster" is? Capitalize "Down Under"? No apostrophe in "Presidents Day" or the roaring "20s," but a necessity in Oakland "A's"? "Kriss Kringle," with a superfluous "s"? "Jamaica rum" and not "Jamaican rum"?

What rhyme or reason justifies such seemingly haphazard choices is no more fathomable than the meaning behind crop circles or REM lyrics. It is precisely this cryptic, unpredictable quality that makes me think it is perhaps a test, the stylebook. Maybe, just maybe, those of us who have forsaken our own independent editorial good sense in honor of Boccardi and his partners, we mark ourselves for whatever nefarious cultural engineering outfit is pulling the strings. Our AP style-right copy is the dye that marks us as the malleable sheep we are. This covert body (an arm of the Knights Templar perhaps) then tracks us with as much as ease as the Audubon Society does tagged egrets. Our names and posts are recorded in a vast database, tended to in secret until which time as our kind is needed.

One day in the future, having proven our blind enthusiasm for authority, we'll agree to be the first colony of drones on the moon, or maybe it will be our hands that are used to build the enormous Sphinx-like edifice sure to be the first order of business in Bill Gates' first term as president of the United States. Tracking our use of AP style, our movements can be followed, our destinies prefabricated and our souls groomed for placement in the networked Orwellian nightmare the meticulously designed blueprints of which are at this very moment sitting on some hidden easel in Washington D.C. or Hollywood.

So what's to be done? Should we revisit the exhortation of Karl Marx in "The Communist Manifesto" and rise up and throw off the yolk of our oppressors?

Embrace the passive disobedience of Gandhi and simply follow our own internal grammatical compass? I don't know. As it stands, it's unfortunately too late for me. Those of us who have for too long nursed at the teat of AP, we are the sick and weak that must be left behind. Our constitutions, like that of junkies, could not withstand the change in diet. In the final analysis, I'm simply too tied to my belief it is wrong to neglect to include a space on either side of a dash. I'm too committed to the use of "vs." rather than "versus" in all cases. However impossible it may be to understand, I've accepted that it's "breakup" and "crackup," but "cover-up" and "grown-up."

I'm like the one old guy in "Cocoon" who won't leave with Wilford Brimley and Maureen Stapleton and others. I can't. The mantle of change falls to all of you not yet lost. For me, I can only follow AP and write "goodbye." You must decide for yourselves whether or not to hyphenate it.