A new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is out. No kids, not Dolce-and-Gabbana kind of style; I’m talking grammar-and-punctuation kind of style. How geeky is my excitement over this? I think the part of my brain at work here is the same one that made me so interested in reading etiquette books as a kid. I couldn’t catch a baseball to save my life, but boy, did I know which fork to use at dinner. Interesting to see I was cultivating my inner snob early on. Not that I ever had occasions to display my learned social graces. Even now, I love the immediacy of the internet, but instead of firing off e-mails, I long to write hand-written notes on fine stationery. “Mr. J. T— regrets that he is unable to accept the kind invitation of…”
A related note: is there a word out there meaning nostalgia for a time period in which one never lived? I was looking at a photo on the Library of Congress website, of the 1925 Big Game (the annual football game between Stanford and Berkeley), and it occurred to me that practically everyone is wearing a hat (American Memory Collection link via LYD). I’ve often said that I miss those days when everyone wore hats. And often I am reminded, oh wait, I wasn’t around then.
Ooh, ooh… a neologism challenge. The first thing that popped into my head was “notstalgia,” though I realize that would be a wistful yearning never to go back to a certain time period… I’m very notstalgic about elementary and high school, for example.
Truly, though, I think the word “nostalgia” itself, while most commonly used to refer to something or somewhen that one actually experienced, also is inclusive of that longing for a past even outside one’s own direct experience.
Thanks, Thom. Indeed, for “nostalgia,” Merriam-Webster gives us:
1 : the state of being homesick : homesickness
2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia
Jeff… You’re an editor. It’s a good thing you’re excited about a new grammar book.
Out with the old and in with the new! Anybody need an old 14th edition? :)
I constantly rail against the tight straitjacket of Chicago style. (Except when the term refers to pizza, of course.) I’m always arguing with editors over my marketing-based style and how it clashes with their strict Chicago. Luckily, as the creative and production manager of various magazines and such, I am the last one to see the words before it’s printed… and thus, I am the arbiter of the style whether they like it or not.
Ask forgiveness, not permission. A good philosophy.
Hi Jeff! Sorry to be the one off-topic, but I’ve zipped in to share some news about your idol, Mr Wainwright. He’s apparently signed up with famed Director Martin Scorcese for the Howard Hughes biopic, “The Aviator”. His co-stars include Leo DiCaprio, Gwen Stefani (No Doubt), and Willem Dafoe. Rufus plays a singer at the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub.
I know this is not quite right, but it came to mind: “Zeitgeist.”
Heh, I remember when I first discovered the word “Zeitgeist.” I thought it was soooooo cool and that nobody in the world would ever know it because it was such an odd word.
I fell in love with the Chicago Manual when I started in publishing, a field I would leave within two years, but I carry the book with me to this day. As I’m in Australia now, I may not update, as it’d be pretty damn expensive now. Still. As for anachronistic nostalgia, a possible neologism presents itself from an Eliot poem: Cheevy, as in “I feel very cheevy when I see pictures from the 1920s.” Miniver Cheevy was, after all, “born too late.”