REVIEW: CHICAGO MANUAL OF STYLE, 18TH ED.

Chicago Manual of Style, 18th Edition book cover

A new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style comes out every seven years: The latest edition was published on September 19, 2024. There are other manuals of style, but the Chicago Manual is the best for writing in the humanities. Every writer, editor, and copyeditor of serious scholarly work in the humanities must own a copy of the latest edition. No, you cannot get away with buying an earlier edition on the cheap – you will just make life a nightmare for everyone else if you do, for there are numerous changes in the 18th edition, and the differences are significant. No excuses. Keep it close at hand and consult it frequently. The other day I wondered whether the title "Sir" was capitalized. I picked up the Manual, and there was the answer (yes, it is capitalized – see paragraph 8.33).

The jacket of the 18th edition is a lurid acid yellow. With a list price of $75, the Chicago Manual is not cheap. But, with 1198 pages that were typeset, printed, and bound in the United States, it is reasonable value for the money.

There are a bunch of changes in this edition. I don't consider them necessary, I don't consider them improvements, I think Chicago is making changes for the sake of change, but better the devil you know than the one you don't. 13.23: In a note with more than two authors, list only the first author, followed by "et al." – in previous editions, it was more than three authors. 13.72: Do not use the 3-em dash for repeated names in a bibliography; instead, repeat the author's name. 8.52: The word "County" is now capitalized in the names of Irish counties, so you write "County Sligo" instead of "county Sligo."

The blurb on the front jacket flap trumpets a new section about inclusive language (5.255-66); it is unhelpful and trendy. The mere mention of "Latinx" (5.259) already looks embarrassing now. However, the nine paraphrases to avoid the pronoun "he" (5.265) are creative and useful. "Black" should be capitalized and "White" may be (8.39). This is different from the rule used by the Associated Press, who capitalize "Black" but do not capitalize "white," which I find illogical. Happily, Chicago leaves a lot of leeway to authors, editors, and publishers (5.257).

The section on "Good Usage Versus Common Usage" (5.254) remains useful but is getting out of date: I'm afraid "less" versus "fewer" is a lost cause. If you don't believe me, go find a supermarket with a checkout line for "10 Items or Fewer." I don't like the word "decimate," and I'd prefer it to drop out of use. Etymologically it means a loss of ten percent, but it is always used for a loss of much more than that. It's confusing. I'd like to see entries about "y'all" and "veggies": Since "you" long ago supplanted "thou" for the second person singular in English, "y'all" has been pushing its way forward, ceasing to be a regional usage of the American South, but instead a way of distinguishing the second person plural from the second person singular. "Veggies" for "vegetables" is increasingly accepted, at least in journalism and on restaurant menus. In ten to twenty years, it will probably be adopted into formal English prose, and in thirty years "veggies" will have supplanted "vegetables" entirely – it's easier to pronounce.

The most useful paragraph in the entire Manual is 5.209, which obliterates the common misconception that you cannot start a sentence with "but" or "and" (this is also mentioned in 5.254). The section on grammar (5.1-251) is sensible. This is particularly praiseworthy, given that modern grammatical studies have taken some bizarre turns (see 5.2, 5.4).

The Manual says (13.6) that authors should include a URL in citations for every source that they consulted online. This will clutter up the manuscript. In my own experience, the addition of too many codes in a large manuscript causes Microsoft Word to run slowly and even, at times, to crash. And since I have consulted many sources before 1930 (which are all in the public domain), most of my sources can be consulted in Google Books or through Hathitrust or Gallica or digitization projects sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, or indeed, the Newman Numismatic Portal; so nearly every source will have a URL. The Chicago Manual envisions a world where we will read "books" in electronic format; each reference will be a hotlink on which we can click through to see the original passage. O brave new world!

Oddly, there is no guidance on how to cite coin auction catalogs or indeed other art auction catalogs (paragraph 14.134, about exhibition catalogs, doesn't really help).

It is annoying to have to shell out 75 bucks every seven years, and to learn that you no longer must replace authors' names with the 3-em dash, after you spent a whole summer day doing just that. "Oceania is at war with Eurasia! Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia!" Oops, do a global replace of "Eurasia" with "Eastasia." But the Manual is so useful and so important that it is better to have it with these minor faults, than not to have it at all.

While we've far outgrown our club newsletter roots, we've always kept The E-Sylum informal and don't adhere to any style guide. A scholarly peer-reviewed publication, we're not. But we try to make it both readable and in a standard style within reason. Or habit. I spell and punctuate things the ways I've gotten used to. If I'm wrong, at least I'm sort-of consistent.

"Good Usage Versus Common Usage" is a minefield, and in numismatics people have been attempting to correct others' usage for decades. I used to "correct" "cent" versus "penny" and "less" versus "fewer", but I realize language evolves (or doesn't) according to its own whims and schedule. I no longer have a high horse to get down from. Many of these "standards" ebb and flow like fads. I never knew where "Latinx" came from, I just started seeing it everywhere. And now I rarely see it. Some word/spelling/capitalization fads stick and some don't. Find out when volumes 19 and 20 appear.

The treatment of web links is something I've grappled with. I've known for 27+ years how to use them on a web page to highlight text that links to another page - that's part of the original HTML standard. But I've always spelled out links (unless they're hideously long) at the end of articles to eliminate clutter. In our early days some readers would print articles, and on the printed page (or a non-touch screen) the links are lost. If spelled out they live on in the new format. But more and more we reference native-digital text, and do sometimes use embedded links that aren't spelled out.

But links on the web are anything but permanent. For example, John's definitive article on "The Law and Practice Regarding Coin Finds - Treasure Trove Law in the United States", the link cited in our 2014 E-Sylum article referencing it is now broken - that page is gone from the internet (www.muenzgeschichte.ch/downloads/laws-usa.pdf). This is why we often quote extensive passages from other web articles - that excerpted text is at least saved in our own archive for future researchers to find.

Luckily, that article and related ones live on elsewhere, as John adds below. Great news. -Editor

The Treasure Trove article that I wrote was one of a series of three: first finds on land in the US, then finds in the water (shipwrecks) in the US, and finally the legal treatment of finds of coins from outside the US.

The International Numismatic Council was formerly hosted on a Swiss website (hence the ".ch" extension), but now has its own website: https://inc-cin.org/

My three articles are at:

https://inc-cin.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/laws-usa.pdf
(Land: treasure trove law in the US)

https://inc-cin.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/laws-usa-shipwrecks.pdf
(Water: US laws concerning historic shipwrecks)

https://inc-cin.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/laws-usa2.pdf
(hoards found outside the US: US Laws concerning the trade in cultural property)

The articles concerning coin find laws in various countries that have been published in the Comptes Rendus of the International Numismatic Council are all assembled at one link:

https://inc-cin.org/home/publications/compte-rendu/cr-laws/

It covers a broad range of countries - an impressive study of international comparative law. The countries covered include Austria, Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, as well as my articles on the laws of the USA. The articles are mostly in English, although there are also articles in French, German, and Spanish. There are some amusing incidents in these articles, for example in Johan van Heesch's article about Belgium, "An archaeologist of the Walloon Region, who became desperate at the continuous plundering of an important Roman hillfort by detectorists, decided to sow thousands of copper nails on the site."

Keep in mind that the law is always in flux, so although those articles were as accurate as the authors could make them as of the time of writing, every time a judge renders a new decision the law changes slightly!

My articles can also be found at academia.edu, for example:

https://www.academia.edu/6903649/The_Law_and_Practice_Regarding
_Coin_Finds_Treasure_Trove_Law_in_the_United_States

There is a solution to the problem of changing links and broken links. It's called a DOI, "Digital Object Identifier." It is a permanent identifier that will remain the same when the formats change. For example, the DOI for the Chicago Manual of Style is https//doi.org/10.7208/cmos18. Chicago recommends that authors include DOIs in their references (see paragraphs 1.37 and 13.7). However, a publisher must apply to obtain a DOI, and not all do.