The Chicago Manual of Style

 Somehow I am on the mailing list of the University of Chicago Press, which informs me that the 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style is now available. I was surprised at the number, but find that the last one I purchased, more than 40 years ago, was the 13th edition. At the time, I had the 12th edition (1969).

In those days, I worked as a copy editor, and the manual was one I used a good deal. I preferred it to the Government Printing Office (GPO) Style Manual. But I started to wonder about my reliance on it, when I encountered

Never mind the Manual--it isn't holy scripture; I haven't joined a religious sect and taken an oath to be ruled by a book.

in Jacques Barzun's essay "Dialogue in C-Sharp" (collected in A Word or Two Before You Go).

And now I think my copies of the Manual of Style are long gone. I have moved three times since I bought the 13th edition, we have lost books to plumbing failures,  I have occasionally and reluctantly purged my shelves, and no doubt the manuals were among those that were misplaced, drenched, or given away. The GPO Style Manual I know I had twenty years ago--I brought it to the office to show somebody the excerpt from John that leads off the foreign-language sections. But no such memory attaches to the Chicago manuals.

I have not edited for pay in many years. The books left over from those days are an early edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, Gowers's The Complete Plain Words, Graves and Hodges's The Reader Over Your Shoulder, maybe the Fowlers' The King's English. But the best practical advice, in some ways, appears in Stendhal's autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, as the advice he wished that he had received from Count Daru when young and first working in the imperial bureaucracy:

When you have a letter to write, think well about what you want to say, and then about the shade of reproof or of command which the minister who will sign your letter will want to convey. When you've made up your mind, write boldly.

 

So Is Man Constituted

 The effect of the newly announced tariffs brought to mind a passage in Egon Friedell's The Cultural History of Modernity, about the relative effect of heavy taxation and religious persecution in motivating the Netherlands' revolt against Spain in the 16th Century:

 This is curious: but so is man constituted: he will suffer attacks on his freedom, his beliefs, indeed even his life sooner than on his income, his wealth, his business. In a similar way the Jacobins, whose administration remarkably resembles in its stupidity and barbarism the otherwise so different Spanish regime, brought on their own fall not through their suppression of all free opinion, their mockery of religion, and their mass executions, but through their attack on private property and their destructive effect on trade, industry, and the value of money. It was not their guillotines that brought them down, but their assignats

A Bit of Pedantry

Sunday's New York Times Magazine has an article--the cover article, "Where Do Nazi Bones Belong?", about the work of the Volksbund, a German group that locates, documents, and reburies the remains of  German soldiers of World War II originally buried where they fell, in haste and without markers. The article has much of interest to say of this work, and of the conflicts that have arisen within the Volksbund between the more moderate members and those whose nationalism does not necessarily stop with the AfD.

However, I was brought to a stop by an account of a futile search for bodies in France. The soldiers supposed to have been buried near Meymac were said in the article to have been captured by the Macquis on June 8, 1945, "in the last days of the war." But June 8, 1945 was after the last days of the war in Europe, almost exactly a month after.

The magazine gives a picture of the author, who appears to be in his mid-forties at the oldest. I do not suppose the memory of World War II would have been the presence in his childhood that was in those of the baby boomers. Still, I'd have expected the editorial structure of the Times to include somebody who could more nearly identify the date of V-E day.