By John Francis
As one keen-eyed reader pointed out to us, we used an American spelling — center — in an ad last issue, instead of the Canadian equivalent — centre.
Oops.
I thought I’d take this opportunity to let our readers know what’s in our Style Manual.
Centre vs Center
We prefer Canadian spellings of words — labour, neighbour, favour, litre, centre etc — but we don’t insist. A number of computer programs autocorrect to American spelling, so we get a lot of content submitted that way. We generally don’t “fix” them; it seems a bit too officious to insist on politically correct spelling. But we try to get it right in the content we generate ourselves.
MNBP vs M.N.B.P.
On punctuation, we use the Economist magazine’s protocols which remove unnecessary periods. That is, we don’t put a period after Mr or Dr and we also leave them out of acronyms such as MNBP, AD and SCUBA. The traditional treatment — M.N.B.P. and A.D. and S.C.U.B.A. — seems like pointless clutter. But once again, we don’t insist. We generally reproduce submitted content as it is received.
Except for apostrophes. We fix apostrophes. Mostly.
Apostrophe Catastrophes
We always fix it’s and its to make them context-appropriate — the one is a possessive (no apostrophe — go figure!); the other is a contraction of it is or it has and contractions always get apostrophes.
Where there are choices, we mostly leave content as submitted. A Seniors Centre (a centre for seniors) could also be written as Seniors’ Centre (centre belonging to the seniors) or even Senior’s Centre (centre belonging to each individual senior). We run the copy as submitted. The same laissez-faire policy applies to boys, girls and ladies.
But not to men, women or children. There are no English words mens or womens or childrens — they have to be possessive: men’s, women’s and children’s — so we always correct those.
So a Seniors Centre is fine with or without an apostrophe but the Men’s Shed always gets one.
Then there’s Lion’s Head and St Edmunds Township.
We always put the apostrophe in Lion’s Head. It has to be possessive because otherwise the phrase makes no sense. One Lion, one Head. If there were multiple lions, it would be Lions Heads.
The same ought to be true of St Edmunds. After all, there was only one of him, so it has to be possessive, right? The problem is that St Edmunds Township is named after Bury St Edmunds in England and Bury St Edmunds has never had an apostrophe since it was founded in AD1020.
So we always correct that by removing apostrophes from St Edmunds. Except in the case of St Edmund’s Anglican Church. The church is not named after the English town, but rather after St Edmund himself — the Anglo-Saxon King of East Anglia who was martyred by the Great Heathen Army of Danes in AD869. (I’m not making this up.)
Dyer Dyers Dyer’s Dyers’
Then there are the bays — Dunks, Dyers and Stokes.
The origins of the names are not clear. All three have been written in multiple ways — Dunks and Dunk’s, Dyer, Dyer’s, Dyers’ and Dyers, Stoke’s and Stokes. We couldn’t see any compelling reason for the apostrophes, so we generally leave them out.
We definitely don’t put an apostrophe into the Lions Club. That’s the name of their organization — Lions International. So the president of that local organization is the Lion’s Head Lions Club Head Lion.
Another source of confusion is Johnston Harbour. I have seen this written as: Johnson, Johnsons, Johnson’s, Johnston, Johnstons, Johnston’s, Johnstone and Johnstone’s. The historical record is unclear — you can find all but Johnstone and Johnstone’s in records dating back a hundred years. The one that seems to appear most often in the older records is Johnston, so that’s what we use.
And finally, there’s Tackabury Street in Lion’s Head, the street that runs by the arena. It was named after one of the earliest settler families — the Tackaberry family. But it got spelled wrong. Easy to correct it, though, right? Well, no. All the surveys, deeds and emergency numbering use the incorrect spelling. So that sort of makes it the correct spelling…
Confused yet? We certainly are.
Each issue of this newspaper includes anywhere from thirty to sixty stories, with material coming from dozens of sources. Then there are a hundred or so ads, many of them built from scratch by our graphics team. Like all newspapers, ours is assembled in a frantic hurry, with the last of the material arriving only an hour or two before the finished paper needs to be sent off to the printer.
What could possibly go wrong?
So we can confidently promise that there will be at least one mistake in every newspaper. We guarantee it.
