This year’s scorching new style (guides)

Behind every publication there’s a fight to determine how a hyphen is used.

By Gabby Colvin consults the style council

Style guides: the difference between knowing that Charles will be coronated on May 6th 2023 or 6 May this year. Also, see: the difference between a happy editor and an unhappy one.

Style guides are the dictators whose decrees alter a publication’s personality; entries which decide political allegiances and keep us up to date with social change. They govern whether “climate sceptics” or only “climate deniers” exist. Whether an entire community is “Latinx” or “Latine” or “Latino”. Whether you say you support “Kiev” or truly support “Kyiv”.

So what changes have been made this year, and how are they altering the essence of your favourite publications?

For many, The Guardian’s furry of climaterelated style adaptations may be the most noticeable in the past few years. Overnight we were suffering from “global heating” instead of “global warming”, facing a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” instead of “climate change” and those who were once “climate sceptics” became “climate deniers”.

But not everyone is quite so quick to change. Lane Green, style guide editor at The Economist (arguably the best known style guide on the planet), takes a much less radical approach. “My job is to keep the ship sailing, not radically alter the course,” he says. And Leo Hickman, former Guardian environmental reporter and now the editor of Carbon Brief, actively decided not to follow in the footsteps of the paper despite broadly keeping to The Guardian’s style-guide for most copy.

“We’re policy neutral,” he explains. “Some audiences might view the changes as a form of advocacy and we have to consider our wide readership across all political spectrums, and across all kinds of geographies.”

For Hickman, the decision is one step too far – not away from journalistic neutrality but towards a non-scientifc association: “I think many people would agree that ‘crisis’ and ‘emergency’ are quite loaded terms – of course it is a crisis, scientists have been saying that for 30 years – but it overlaps too tightly with the language of campaigners and we’re not a campaigning organisation.”

Gal-dem, on the other hand, chooses to stand in solidarity with campaigners - “anti-abortion” instead of “prolife” for instance.

“I think it’s rare that true objectivity ever exists,” Naomi Larsson Peñeda from gal-dem’s political section says. “We’re very clear on our political leanings and so we would never compromise on that – the reason we exist is to project our values.”

For Green at The Economist, specifcity is everything when it comes to politics. “‘Prolife’ is a self-serving label, it really means ‘against abortion rights’, so to be clear I always say ‘the supporters of abortion rights’ or ‘opponents of legal abortion.’”

This specifcity allows The Economist to side-step quickly evolving language such as that relating to the LGBTQ+ community, or any communities for that matter: “We make changes fairly conservatively and we’re not going to be the frst person to make a particular change. We’re not Buzzfeed.”

Lane continues: “The specifc term is always better on all counts than a recently coined term. BAME or BIPOC, for exampleboth of them are umbrella terms that give a sense of solidarity, but I don’t like defning people by being non-white.

“If you’re talking about Latinos it’s helpful to distinguish between the Cuban Americans of Florida and the Puerto Ricans of New York because they’re entirely different cultures...we’re not trying to be the cool kids, we’re trying to have a classic style that will survive several generations.”

“To me,” Larsson Peñeda says, “our terms need to refect what’s going on and exactly how people wish to be referred to.”

Some decisions are a practical matter rather than a sliding spectrum of neutrality to activism. “We want to maintain consistency with our terminology,” Hickman said. “And actually, sometimes when I’m scanning an article in The Guardian, the changes trip me up.” up.”

Hickman is not the only one to be tripped up by stylistic decisions, as Suzanne Blumsom, executive newspaper editor of The Financial Times and 15 years style guide authority explains: “We used to write million as ‘M’ until it came to our attention that the software visually impaired people were using to listen to our copy interprets the ‘M’ as ‘meter’ instead of ‘million.’” Consequently, The Financial Times decided to add an “n” (making it “13 Mn,” for example) despite a year-long back and forth and the corporate desk confessing that it looked “a bit ugly”.

The extra letter caused uproar. “People hated it,” says Blumsom, “Which is surprising because we had a good reason, we were trying to be inclusive, but even now I get letters from readers saying ‘why did you put an ‘n’ it looks so ugly on your homepage’…so yes, I ended up on the radio again for that.”

Blumsom is referencing a few recently ruffed feathers with a change from “data” being treated as singular to plural – “data is” not “data are”. A large debate broadly sparked by the Latin route of the word, which Lane Green was also forced to weigh in on. “I just became convinced that there was no strong case for keeping data plural when it was making a lot of sentences look very odd. There are Latin plurals that are now English singular words like candelabra, stamina, agenda and it’s just… we don’t have to obey Latin.”

The fact that such a small change caused such heated exhanges is evidence of the importance of a style guide. “A red-letter day,” tweeted Alan Beattie, Financial Times columnist. “For anyone opposed, I’d like to know what your agendum is.”

“Next decision should be using singular for panino,” responded Mark Leach, Editor of Wonkhe, “I ate one panino today. Tomorrow I buy a selection of panini for my friends.” appeal from the Ukranian government to stop utilising Russian spelling.

The seemingly small change led to several thousands of Tweets and a live Radio 4 appearance from Blumsom.

“So we’ve made the decision to change the spellings or names of countries based off their want to throw off a colonial past before — Chennai or Mumbai, for instance,” explains Blumsom, “but our Spanish correspondent wanted to remove the anglicised spellings for Spanish cities and in that regard, we maintain that we are an English newspaper.”

Alliance express that the capital letter suggests the existence and legitimacy of ‘Semitism’ which could be seen to legitimise “a form of pseudo-scientifc racial classifcation that was thoroughly discredited by association with Nazi ideology.”

When it comes to hard and fast rules for style, opinions vary, but directness seems to be at the forefront of every style guide editor’s agenda.

“We scoured through a lot of past copies and found that usage was heavily weighted towards singular before we went nuclear,” she explains, still quick to defend the decision almost a month later. “What’s most important when you’re on a style committee is to be aware of the evolution of language and you’re always going to come up against people who want to stay the same,” she concedes.

A recent debate in the style guide committee at The Financial Times, which is made up of a diverse selection of the most passionate and pernickety editors and contributors, has been whether or not to refer to cities in their mother-tongue. A wide range of publications have made the switch from referring to “Kiev” to “Kyiv” after an

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, directness is more than a matter of style for Lane Green, it’s a moral imperative. He explains: “Take ‘collateral damage’ versus ‘civilian deaths,” he says, brow furrowed,. “The former just pads the language, it makes you not see dead bodies on the ground and if you don’t want dead bodies on the ground, then you should make people see them in their mind’s eye… because then they should take action to make it stop. That’s very important to me, it is very important to most of us I think - to be unfinching and direct and honest, even when it’s a little painful.” Directness can be a diffcult line to tread when it comes to identity and inclusivity.

“I think inclusivity is vital,” Larsson Peñeda confrms, “and if you want to make the world more inclusive you have to listen to the people – journalistically, in terms of both the stories you cover and the language you use to refer to people.”

Even tiny changes like the position of a hyphen can have a weighty meaning, as is exemplifed by The Financial Times’s most recent change from “Anti-Semitism” to “antisemitism”. Jewish groups such as the International Holocaust Remembrance