Post by Adam FunkPost by Peter T. DanielsPost by Peter T. DanielsPost by Adam FunkThat all makes perfect sense, but that kind of independent thinking &
reasoning is just the sort of thing the CMOS dinosaurs aim to
suppress.
Unfortunately
No.
How msny book manuscripts have you edited?
How many unedited or inconsistently edited books have you tried to read?
But you said "would publish _any_-styled ms. so long as it was
internally consistent, whether or not it followed the CMS style".
That is _now_. Maybe they're desperate to expand into fields where the
writers have become accustomed to the barbaric APA style -- where no
author has a first name, where journal volumes are in bold italic, where
page numbers are in parentheses, etc.
Why didn't you answer either of the questions?
This year I've had to use G. R. Driver's *Aramaic Documents of the
Fifth Century B.C.*, published in 1957 by Clarendon. Mr. Driver was
already fairly elderly at that time, and any notion that there ought
to be any sort of consistency or regularity in his citations was
foreign to him. There's a list of abbreviations that he supposedly
uses, but his abbreviations often don't agree with what's there, and
he uses others that are not explained at all: for instance,
'UCOIP.' LXV 27-9.
(note 1 on p. 3).
Eventually I thought of something it might be (happily it's a work that's
available on line), and it is in fact something that has little to do
with Aramaic documents or the fifth century B.C.
But if I were an English scholar, especially, in 1957 I'd have had to submit
my guess to the library clerk and wait -- perhaps hours, or perhaps until the
next day -- for the book to be brought, and perhaps would have discovered
that the guess was wrong; or even if the guess was right, it had no
bearing on the sentence it was referenced to.
Post by Adam FunkAnyway, no copy-editor would let you get away with "usedbook"; you
might manage to squeak "howcome" through. So are you for or against
thinking for yourself?
Why would those words come up in a book or article I was preparing for
academic publication?