usage

Questions From Users of the Manual

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Q:  Do you recommend end point or endpoint?  I have folks dying on their grammatical swords over this and thought you might have an opinion.

A:  We follow Dorland’s and use end point.  Replying quickly so as little blood as possible is shed.

Q:  I failed to find guidance in the Manual on correct use of the apostrophe with plural compound nouns, eg, the possessive of mothers-in-law.  What would you advise?

A:  You are quite right that we don’t include any examples that address this specifically and it would be helpful to do so.  (A thought for the next edition—or an annotation for section 8.7.3 if you are an online subscriber.)  I would recommend mothers-in-law’s, as in mothers-in-law’s first meeting.  The Chicago Manual of Style also recommends this (section 7.23):  my sons-in-law’s addresses.

Q:  Where is the style going on the treatment of Web site?  We use Web site but are seeing it more and more frequently as website, or web site, or Website.

A:  JAMA and the Archives Journals are still sticking with Web site, but the new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is recommending website.  So, it appears that things are, indeed, shifting but we have not shifted yet!

Q:  We’re having a debate about the order of footnotes in a table.  Are they ordered left to right, top to bottom?  Or are they ordered by where they fall in terms of the table components (eg, title, column heading, row heading, field) and then left to right, top to bottom?

A:  There’s a great example in the Manual on on page 93 (Table 10).  In that table, which has a raft of footnotes, you’ll see that the order is basically from top to bottom and, within that, from left to right…as we expect readers would move through a table as they were reading it.  That said, there is nothing sacred about this and a publication could certainly establish a different policy (eg, with the table body, priority could be given to footnotes attached to table stubs, so that if you had footnotes a and b in stubs high up in the table and then footnotes c, d, and e in rows below this but NOT in the table stubs, and then footnote f in a later stub, you might decide to make the stub footnotes a through c [renaming f to c] and then the footnotes within the body of the table d through f. )—Cheryl Iverson, MA

A Healthy Discussion

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You’d think a nutritionist would know the correct usage of healthy vs healthful. Not so. At a recent nutrition educational meeting at the AMA, the nutritionist used the words interchangeably: healthful eating or healthy behavior. That’s a head-scratcher for me. I was hoping for clarification after a stinging rebuke—(I have been accused of being dramatic)—when my editing of healthy behavior to healthful behavior in a commentary had been reversed.

Shaken, I turned to the dictionary to confirm my position and found, as I thought, that healthful promotes health and healthy represents the state of good health. Yet, my editor’s complaint was that healthful seemed unnecessary. My attempts at persuasion fell short, so I had hoped the nutritionist’s discussion would help me gain my equilibrium.

Realizing her discussion placed her in my boat, I decided to see what the authorities who address it had to say.

Fowler’s Modern English Usage1 notes that the distaste for the use of healthful is particular to the United States, a “problem that hardly arises in Britain.” Comparing 3 dictionaries for non-English speakers, Editor R. W. Burchfield observes that one calls its use “old fashioned or literary”; a second, “formal.” The third omits it.

Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage2 says the confusion has existed since the 16th century and claims that the distinction between the terms was created as recently as 1881 by Alfred Ayers. Webster’s concludes that those who “observe the distinction between healthful and healthy … are absolutely correct, and in the minority.” Those who “ignore the distinction … are absolutely correct, and in the majority.”

The Chicago Manual3 hedges by making the distinction between the 2 words, but admits “But gradually healthy is taking over.”

As usual, it doesn’t really matter. But what should one do when making it an adverb? Healthfully or healthily? Hmmm.—Beverly Stewart, MSJ

1. Burchfield RW. Fowler’s Modern English Usage. 3rd rev ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press; 2004.

2. Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster Inc.

3. The Chicago Manual of Style. 16th ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; 2010.