In the middle of our congratulatory fervor after the launch of the 16th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style, one member of the team reminded us that not every moment of the process had been as joyful. It turns out that over the months our occasional angst and confusion had been secretly recorded from e-mails and meetings by David Morrow, senior editor in our reference division and team leader for the revision.
We thought the outtakes were too funny to keep to ourselves, so here are David’s “outtakes.”
(Fortunately, none of us remembers who said what.)
CMOS 16 OUTTAKES
“The indention rules don’t make sense to a normal person, but editors live for them.”
“Do you think anybody has ever read that paragraph?”
“It was really a pleasure talking with you about CMOS and Iggy Pop.”
“How would you like to do another one of those really crummy jobs?”
“Wow, that looks great. Except the document you updated is about six versions old.”
“We’re gonna get a lot of letters over that one.”
“It’s time to unleash my rant: these rules make perfect sense, but they are untenable in most situations.”
“I could not begin to guess what kind of data a table so titled would hold.”
“XML-coded tabular matter is not particularly human readable.”
“We can’t change that rule. People will revolt.”
“Let’s assign random but believable numbers to these tables. “
“For fun, I also presented the paper permanence symbol in chapter 1 as an image.”
“Volume editors are responsible for that? In what universe?”
“Fish immunology—I love it!”
“Waffle alert—although I myself don’t mind if this rule offers a choice.”
“I agree with everyone else that it looks sufficiently ugly as is.”
“OK, let me put forth the worst suggestion so far.”
“Editor: Will anyone be annoyed if we change the way that works? Techie: Well, uh. . . me.”
“You’re kidding. It’s blue?”
“I’m going to take some notes, as if we were saying important things.”
“Please stop using spreadsheet as a verb. Are you gonna spreadsheet that?”
“I’m sorry, there are errors in the error messages.”
“If you want to try talking the designer into using Times New Roman, be my guest, buddy.”
“Has that term actually been used by anyone since, like, the beatniks?”
“What’s the difference between user testing and usability testing?”
“This is a made decision. Didn’t we already make that decision? I have no recollection of any such decision.”
“I know, nobody’s going to want to do that. I’ll bring donuts.”
“Make up your mind. Is it a dependency or is it a deliverable?”
“I’m not saying it’s illogical. It’s logical. But that doesn’t mean we have to do it.”
“When you really think about it, what is an en dash good for?”
“Oh god, you want me to read it again, don’t you?”
“We’ve been here two hours without a break! Do you want me to pee on the document?”
“Right now, the project is in the freak-out stage.”
“Oh no! Not the whiteboard!”
“I’ve just given you another reason to be grateful I’m not in Marketing, haven’t I.”
“Put the laser pointer down. Now.”
“What we’re looking at is not the final design. Calm yourself.”
“Seriously, how many kinds of conjunctions can there be?”
“There’s an index of the index?”
“I’m not sure which is more foreign—Romanian and Moldavian or Matrices and Determinants.”
“That phrase is inherently nonprecise.”
“You edited the whole thing already? You’re a machine.”
“XML, SCHMEXML—this has to be right.”
“This seems a wildly arbitrary exception; can we change it?”
“That doesn’t make sense—a table’s not an illustration.” “These aren’t tables; they’re illustrations of tables.”
“You mean to tell me you looked at the spacing around all the apostrophes?”
“What’s with all the watches in the examples?”
“I just finished chapter 10. For the next few days, I may be able to speak only in abbreviations, some of them Latin.”
“The preface says, ‘to be published simultaneously in print and online.’ Does that scare the hell out of anybody else?”
“Needs rewrite. Though the gradation scale is infinite, I don’t believe any one image could contain an infinite gradation.”
“I’m no expert either, but that’s not going to keep me from giving my opinion.”
“I agree with you, but what exactly do we mean by foreign names?”
“We’re using the online version to check the cross references in the print version. Trust me, it makes sense.”
“We’ve got one of four questions resolved; we’ll call that half done.”