Many writer types like us begin a new year, not necessarily with resolutions and goal setting, but by reviewing the expert writing and editing practices AP style has outlined in recent months.
In mid-2024, the Associated Press introduced its 57th edition (2024-2026) with 300+ new or updated items, unveiling the news at the ACES: The Society for Editing’s annual conference, a practice for the AP since 2010.
ACES Communications and Publications Committee Member Gerri Berendzen, an ACES Communications and Publications Committee member and lecturer at the University of Kansas, offered a concise summary of the AP Stylebook updates after the ACES conference.
As she points out in her news update, AP announced that Merriam-Webster will be its primary dictionary going forward; this after having Webster’s New World College Dictionary as its first source for decades.
Specific major edits and tweaks in the new AP Stylebook include how the written word should now refer to “climate change” and “climate crisis” as well as a few specific modifications for persons, including the words “obesity, obese, overweight” and “homeless, homelessness, unhoused” and changes to entries about gender and “Native Americans, Indigenous people/peoples.” These updates and tweaks generally follow the people-first language (PFL), which the disability community has used for years, offering respect to all persons by considering them first as a person, not defining them by any particular condition or modifier. AP recommends, when possible, asking people how they want to be described; always a good idea!
I found it somewhat ironic that another new AP update is to not use modifiers like very, really, or rather with the word “unique” – personally, I find the word unique to be mostly overused. If something is actually unique, very rarely will a writer need to point that out; it should be self-evident.
Compounding my snark and to round out this blog, I’m going to throw in some “words of the year” as noted by respected language and lexicon experts, including Merriam-Webster, AP’s new primary dictionary source.
I find it fun when there’s a bit of wit…or just a whit of the ridiculous with words! Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2024 was polarization – ironic that, despite our polarization, I think we can agree to the prevalence of that word in 2024.
Some notable runner-up words from Merriam-Webster included totality (thanks to the April eclipse event), fortnight (a nod to Taylor Swift’s musical influence), pander and weird (from the 2024 presidential election), and allision (which refers to when a ship like the Dali runs into a stationary object like the Francis Scott Key Bridge). That March 2024 event was technically an allision as opposed to a collision, which is contact between two moving objects. Who knew?
Just to poke a little more tongue-in-cheek fun, the Oxford University Press tagged “brain rot” as Oxford’s word of the year in 2024. What I found most fascinating about this fact was, not that Oxford’s experts noticed a 230% increase in the use of “brain rot” between 2023 and 2024, but that editors first tracked the term to Henry David Thoreau’s book “Walden” from 1954.
Proves that as much as we move forward, some of the old classics still stand the test of time.