Sunday, December 30, 2012

Are You Anti-American?

Listening to Grammar Girl last week, Mignon Fogarty covered hyphen rules.  One of her points was the need for a hyphen for prefixes attaching to proper nouns, and her example was "anti-American."

Not "Anti-American."

Because you can be "anti-intellectual" according to the AP Stylebook, just not "all-American."

Shouldn't it be the same?  Yes, it should, and without going into the depths of this running error within the logic of the AP Stylebook (the provenance of the "All" relates to AP's claim to trademark on the naming of all-American teams in football and men's basketball; and was struck from the guides in the early 1980s leaving behind the misnomer that any all-America team should be All-America).

If you want to delve further, here's the link back to my justification to AP of why they should change the stylebook from 2011.

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