typography

Ding Dong: the Death Dagger Is Dead

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AMA Manual of Style, section 2.3.2, has an ominous subheading: “Death.” I’ve quoted it below:

Death. If an author of an article has died before the article goes to press or is posted online, a death dagger (†) should follow the author’s name in the byline, and one of the following footnotes should be inserted after the author affiliation footnote.

†Died November 17, 2005.

†Deceased.

Okay. That’s super-goth and all, but…why? Is that useful information for a reader? Does it serve any purpose other than a moment of recognition that life is fleeting, memento mori, etc?

Also, the life of a scholarly article is long—why single out the author who died during a relatively narrow window (from acceptance to publication)? We’re all going to die someday, including every byline author. (Sorry if you came to AMA Style Insider for happy feelings. Here is a picture of a puppy.)

At a recent stylebook committee meeting, we decided to kill the death dagger. (Get it?) If authors want to note that a coauthor is deceased, a note can be put into the acknowledgment section instead.

Interestingly, the dagger symbol is sometimes called an obelus. A variant on this symbol was probably used by Homeric scholar Zenodotus to critically mark lines in manuscripts that were of dubious attribution. The Oxford English Dictionary uses it to note that a word is obsolete. It seems a bit cruel to use the same typographical mark to denote a person as dead and to mark a word as obsolete—-but I suppose I can see the connection.—Brenda Gregoline, ELS

 

 

Questions From Users of the Manual

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Q: How do you create a “thin space” in Word?

A: In Word, use the shortcut to the ¼ em space character under Insert/Symbol/Special Characters. The Unicode value for the ¼ em space is 2005, and it’s in the General Punctuation section of any Unicode font. The 1/6 em space is also used as a thin space; the Unicode value for that is 2006, and it’s also in the General Punctuation section of any Unicode font.

Q: Is it necessary to include http:// in a URL? What about www.? I like to avoid long strings for URLs and if it’s OK to shorten them, that’s what I’d like to do. 

A: The http:// in the URL is only necessary in text to ensure that the reader knows that the information provided is a website. If that information is clear from the context without http://, it is not necessary. To know whether www is necessary or not, you should try the URL without it. Some URLs require the www, while others will not work if www is added. To ensure that the URL is correct, you should check it on the Internet.

Q: Can you please tell me how many journals use the AMA Manual of Style?  Does a list of these journals exist?

A: I don’t have the data you request…and I’d certainly be interested myself. I can tell you that we’ve  sold  almost 30,000 copies of the print book, in addition to site licenses and individual subscriptions to the online book. Although this doesn’t answer your question precisely, the number of copies sold might be of some help.—Cheryl Iverson, MA