Grant and Martha share some of their favorite tweets from Fake AP Stylebook, the Twitter feed that tweaks journalistic style and tropes, such as “Do not change weight of gorilla in phrase, ‘800-lb gorilla in the room.’ Correct weight is 800 lbs. DO NOT CHANGE GORILLA’S WEIGHT!” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Fake AP Stylebook Tweets”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
These days, some of my favorite little bits of laughter come from the fellows who run the Twitter account called Fake AP Stylebook.
Do you know this one, Martha?
Oh, boy, do I.
There, they give their version of English usage advice for journalists in a send-up of the stodgy and the self-important Associated Press.
Stodgy and self-important means, it’s another way of saying, ready for a takedown.
So they put things like, advice like, the British spelling of color is, blimey, color, I say, what ho?
Or, Xerox is a trademarked name, use butt duplicator.
I mean, because all this, AP Style Guide takes itself so seriously, even on their own Twitter account, and it’s, I don’t know, it’s just begging for this kind of treatment.
One other bit of advice from the fake AP Stylebook guys is, it’s inappropriate to bluntly state how dumb your city’s kids are.
Just hope readers understand what underperforming means.
And so they’re also speaking kind of truth about the tiredness of some types of journalism, aren’t they?
Yeah, yeah.
And everybody I know turns to the AP Stylebook as this Bible of style and usage.
One of my favorite tweets from them was, do not change weight of gorilla in phrase 800-pound gorilla in the room.
Correct weight is 800 pounds.
Do not change gorilla’s weight.
Another one that I liked was the correct plural of moose is, I have been living in central Maine for far too long.
These are questions that people ask all the time.
Why don’t we say meese instead of mooses?
Frankly, sometimes the funny answers are more useful than the real ones.
Because at the bottom of this, AP Stylebook is a constructed style guide.
It’s a group of people’s opinions.
It’s not like it’s the universal law of English.
And to assume that it’s some kind of reverent, august manual that must be obeyed is foolishness.
And this kind of foolishness underscores it even more.
Yeah, yeah.
I love the specificity of fake AP Stylebook.
Like, use the quintuple vowel to transcribe the utterances of small children.
Daddy, I want a pony.
The quintuple vowel being four letters in a row.
Five.
Five.
In any case, those laughs and more just like it come from the Twitter account called FakeAPStylebook.
It’s twitter.com fact slash fakeAPStylebook.
You can also find us on Twitter at twitter.com slash Wayword.
That’s W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.
And you can send us email to words@waywordradio.org and give us a call on the telephone at 1-877-929-9673.
