I regularly get emails from friends that start like this: “Dear Grammar Nazi…” What follows is a question about, for instance, whether to use “climatic” or “climactic”, to which I will respond, “It depends. Are you talking about weather or the end of the world?” Or how to correctly use ex officio in a sentence. I love it. Thinking and talking about proper grammar gets me high. It is the only thing I can still see myself being excited about (professionally, that is) in twenty years. Before I go to sleep at night, I think about sentence structure and the proper use of “which” vs. “that” and whether or not to capitalize prepositions that are more than five letters long in book titles.

With this kind of passion comes some annoyance as well. Boyfriends have told me they were nervous to send me email, afraid I would be scrutinizing their every word for misspellings and syntactical inaccuracies. When friends do catch a mistake in emails or publications, they tease me mercilessly. Family members goad me into talking like a hick, just because it sounds so funny coming out of my pristine mouth. (“Come on, Girl. Just say ‘There’s beer here what ain’t been drunk.'”)

All of that said, I’m not flawless. I’m better than the average person, sure. But there are way better grammarians than I (me? See?). So when I have a question, or when someone asks me a question I don’t have the answer to (more often the case, snoot snoot), I turn to my trusty Chicago Manual of Style for help. I took a whole class in college about how to use it. We spent weeks learning how to think like one of its editors so that we could easily and speedily turn to the index and find exactly what we were looking for. I bought one for myself after that class and sometimes flip through it for fun. When the 15th edition came out a couple of years ago, I made my boss buy a copy for the office. As a literary organization, I argued, we simply HAD to have the latest and greatest on hand.

Yesterday, a co-worker at my semi-newish job asked me how to refer to a man who used to be governor of our state. I turned to grab my CMS and realized, gasp!, that I don’t have it here. So I went online and found this. My stomach did a little flip and I’ve been all atwitter ever since. I’m still going to ask my semi-newish boss if we can buy at least one copy of the 15th for my office here, but in the meantime, oh, I’m happy as a pig in shit.

Chicago Manual of Style Q&A

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