Guardian America Doesn’t Need Your Lousy American Style Guide
Hey, Guardian America is now online! Michael Tomasky scored a Hillary Rodham Clinton interview and hipster philosopher Slvoj Zizek gets front page billing here in the States.
But, damn it, Inigo Thomas wants you to know that Guardian America would never do anything as vulgar as (gasp!) use American English:
Guardian America, the US edition of the British newspaper, won’t use American spellings and punctuation. What will make it a Guardian publication will be its adherence to the Guardian stylebook, a volume that since the 1920s has gone through several editions and revisions and which is available in bookshops and here on the Guardian’s website. Valour, behaviour, realise and programme therefore will prevail over valor, behavior, realize and program. Nor will there be the serial comma – sometimes known, pretentiously, as the Oxford comma – which is familiar to many American publications. You’ve noticed I left out the comma after realise – that’s where the serial comma would have been placed. Gone is much italicisation – and the ‘z’ from many -isations. The Guardian is the Guardian, not The Guardian. Perhaps most strikingly – and certainly most vexingly to Guardian America’s editor, who tells me he made his views clear to London, but with little success – a State Department official will have to live with the more flattened description of him- or herself as a state department official: the rule for capitalisation is to lower case when possible.
There you have it: Tomasky is a patriotic crusader in the color vs. colour wars and the infamous Grauniad is not mentioned. At all.
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