|X-Sender: vr@smtp.panix.com |From: Vicki Rosenzweig vr@redbird.org |Sender: wikien-l-admin@wikipedia.org |Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org |Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2003 08:51:35 -0500 | |At 08:11 PM 3/2/03 -0800, Sean wrote: |>On the contrary, the form 2 March 2003 simply IS correct in American |>English. The Chicago Manual of Style prefers "that in all text, |>including notes and bibliographies, exact dates be written in the |>sequence day-month-year, without internal punctuation." Rule 8.36. | |There is no one body entitled to name US usage, and the University |of Chicago Press certainly isn't. CMOS is what they want for the |books they publish, no more and no less. Others often find it useful: but |when I worked for a magazine that followed Chicago on most things, we set |dates in the form March 3, 2003, not 3 March 2003. |
That's not what my copy of 12th edition the CMOS says. It states (rule 8.14),
"The University of Chicago press prefers that in all text the day, month and year be written without internal punctuation [in the form 5 November]
"Other acceptable forms are: On November 22, 1963 . . . The course of events on the twenty-second of November
They go on to state that after the first specific reference to a day and month, elliptical references to other days in that month should be spelled out. "On 5 November, the national elections took place. By the morning of the sixth . . .
I submit we would not want to follow them in this case. Of course, style guides are not written by Nazis, and not even the CMOS, authoritative as it is, requires any of this in every instance.
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88