No Hamas? Latest AP Stylebook is a head-scratcher

Despite all the head-scratchers, including the missing Hamas entry, I offer the AP editors my highest compliment. I’ll keep both the 56th and 57th editions handy — and encourage editing students to do the same.”

Buck Ryan, director of the Citizen Kentucky Project at the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Media

Style wizards at the Associated Press fulfilled Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal for Israel — they made Hamas disappear.

Showing again that the pen is mightier than the sword, the AP inexplicably deleted the Hamas entry from its Stylebook’s 57th print edition. Fear not; its Hezbollah entry was retained.

So goes the long tradition of driving copy editors crazy.

I stumbled on the Hamas omission while updating a chapter on style as co-author of a new editing book. The chapter now includes a compare-and-contrast with AP’s previous editions. Never confuse change with progress. 

In the AP’s 56th edition, one of my favorite sections, “Briefing on media law,” turned the stylebook into a valuable textbook for journalism students. Alas, the AP cut the section to save space in the 57th edition, sentencing it to “online only.” 

The new edition pulls off a magic trick: It drops 110 pages from the last one while adding three chapters (Artificial Intelligence, Criminal Justice and Technology) and two sections (Digital Journalism and Checklist for Self-Editing). There was plenty of room to keep the 44-page media law briefing. 

So, what else did the AP editors cut? Well, a lot of spelling words that used to show up on editing tests, such as accommodate, airfare and airstrike, and supersede. They also dropped the entry for teen, teenager (n.) teenage (adj.) with the warning: "Do not use teen-aged."

Thank God the editors preserved judgment, liaison, jack-o’-lantern and Canada goose! 

AP’s latest edition leaves purists clutching half their pearls. It holds the line against “like” as a conjunction. No, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” circa 1954. Then it caves on “unique,” saying it’s OK to refer to something rare as “very unique.”

The editors also changed the entry for Day One to Day 1, dropped the hyphens in G7 and G20, capitalized Hajj and put the “+” in LGBTQ+ in the 57th print edition. That’s a change to the LGBTQ entry that AP made earlier online.

The biggest change, however, was jilting an old friend, Webster's New World College Dictionary, 5th edition, and finding a new lover in Merriam-Webster as the preferred primary dictionary.

The editors saved space by eliminating many words listed in Merriam-Webster and encouraged writers to go there for guidance.

Yet Merriam-Webster spells out Day One; it’s silent on G-7 or G-20, with or without hyphens; it keeps hajj lowercase; and its LGBTQ entry provides a complete definition with examples, adding LGBTQ+ and LGBTI. 

I learned early in my editing career to abide inconsistency and endure idiosyncrasy. I got my first workout with a ring-bound AP Stylebook when I interned at the Buffalo (New York) Evening News in 1977.

Old hands on the copy desk told the tale of how the publisher demanded that “The Happy Hooker” film title be airbrushed out of the movie ads to read “The Happy Hoofer” because the word “hooker” had no place in a family newspaper. 

When I got to the Chicago Tribune copy desk in 1980, I was instructed to write “employe” with one “e” and “cigaret” with its butt chopped off. 

Old-timers on that copy desk, at least one who had a scrapbook of stories about Al Capone, regaled me with tales about the reign of Col. Robert McCormick. 

The Colonel, who became the Tribune’s publisher and editor in 1925, died in 1955. One detractor called him “the greatest mind of the 14th century.” Here’s what the old-timers told me:

 Lobbying to build McCormick Place on the lakefront, the Colonel insisted that its main competition for conventions, the International Amphitheatre, be henceforth known in the Tribune as “Amphitheatre in the Stockyards.” Who in their right mind would want to meet in that bloody place?

He who publishes a stylebook wields great power — if only by forcing journalism students to buy two editions in their four-year college careers.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to like about the 57th edition. It offers great advice to students on covering crime stories, demystifying AI and navigating social media and the digital world. 

Despite all the head-scratchers, including the missing Hamas entry, I offer the AP editors my highest compliment. I’ll keep both the 56th and 57th editions handy — and encourage editing students to do the same.

Buck Ryan is the director of the Citizen Kentucky Project at the University of Kentucky’s School of Journalism and Media. Best known for his Maestro Concept approach to storytelling, Ryan is co-author with Michael O’Donnell of “Editing. The Essential Guide to Better Writing Across Today’s Media” from Cognella.