What's your style? For word nerds, that's a loaded question

My wife Beth recently took on some editing work for a regional magazine, and the first thing they did was send her the publication’s “stylesheet,” which she passed on to me.

If you are a normal human being, you will find a stylesheet about as interesting as the warranty information in a lawn tractor’s owners manual. But if you are in any way affiliated with English usage, a stylesheet is as magical as Christmas morning for a tot.

Forget that it’s 12 pages of fine print, we will read every last blessed letter of it, expressing by degrees satisfaction, outrage and shouts of amazement across the room, viz, “Did you see that? My God, they spell ‘backcountry’ as one word.”

If you do not know what I’m talking about, a stylesheet is a literary manifesto dictating how a publication or industry (newspapers, book publishers, et al.) treats debatable elements of the English language.

For example, there is a hard and fast rule governing the difference between its and it’s. No problem there. However, if you re-read the first sentence of the second paragraph of this column you will see the term “lawn tractor’s owners manual.” Why would “owners” not get an apostrophe? So happy you asked.

Yes, as an owner, it might be thought of as my manual, hence an owner’s manual. Except the tractor company is writing for all owners, not just me. So that might make it an owners’ manual. But it’s just one manual we’re referring to, and cannot belong to everyone.

So owners is not a possessive, it is a collective, referring to a group not an acquisition.

OK, you’re saying, so a stylesheet guarantees consistency and keeps everyone from fighting over trivial points, right?

WRONG.

Stylesheets do just the opposite. They foster dissent, anger and hatred and competing stylesheets and stylebooks that battle with the same blood-dripping intensity with which religions fight over the one true God.

For example, I guarantee you that as you read this there are editors sharpening their pencils and their knives about to contend  that “owners” does indeed require an apostrophe. However, I can block them by noting that according to both Associated Press and Chicago style manuels, Veterans Day has no apostrophe for the same reasons. Checkmate.

This won’t change their minds; it never does. However, it will delay the attack as they go hunting through the manuals to find plausible counter examples. Which they are likely to find, because stylebooks are consistent in their inconsistency.

AP assures us that backyard is one word. So naturally frontyard is one word too, correct? Oh you innocent fool. Of course it isn’t because — who knows?

Let's take a local example. North of Hagerstown, we have Longmeadow Road (one word) but Long Meadow Volunteer Fire Co. So yes, the Long Meadow fire company is on Longmeadow Road. But while we're at it, it's Long Meadow Shopping Center (two words). Oh, and the community is also known as Long Meadow, although some press releases sent to the newspaper over the years have incorrectly called it Longmeadow.

Oh, and not to confuse you more, but it's Rotary Club of Long Meadows (two words, but plural).

Isn’t this fascinating! It also explains a lot of things that you probably didn’t know before, such as why editors never get invited to parties.

And you really want to punch a bucket of tar? Get editors and publishers talking numbers. Some styles use numerals: 72. Some spell them out: seventy-two. Some spell them out up to ninety-nine and then change over to numerals. Some use numerals down to 10 and then spell out one through nine. Unless it’s an age. Or a measurement. Or a few other things.

And while all editors are, collectively, ayatollahs, each one has one or two individual Major Freaking Psychotic Hatreds (like the Oxford comma or using two spaces after a period) and if you cluelessly step on one of those land mines, heaven have mercy on your soul.

But give us a break. We’re writers, we have to take drama where we find it.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Nuances of spelling, capitalization, etc., are a matter of style