What to Do if Fireworks Are Canceled? Think about Grammar and Formatting!
NB: There should be superscript “th”s throughout this issue . . . I published this issue on a different newsletter-hosting platform but couldn’t get the formatting to transfer to Substack.
If fireworks are canceled in your area as a coronavirus-related precaution, here’s something you can do with the time you would have spent admiring “the rockets’ red glare”: think about various capitalization, punctuation, and formatting considerations related to this weekend’s holiday. Is the name of the holiday the 4th of July, the 4th of July, or the Fourth of July? Are we celebrating the beginning of the U.S. or the US?
There aren’t definitive answers to those questions. As The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) told an elementary school teacher who wrote into their monthly Q&A to ask about abbreviations for the United States of America, “authoritative style manuals and dictionaries vary in their recommendations.”
But I happen to think that the authoritative style manual that provides the best answers to these two questions is in fact CMS. Despite their modesty in this response, there are helpful rationales behind their recommendations.
The Fourth of July
CMS’s recommendation is to call the holiday the Fourth of July; the shortened form is the Fourth (section 8.89). This follows Chicago’s general advice to write out “whole numbers from zero through one hundred,” advice that applies to ordinal numbers (first, second, third, fourth, etc.) in addition to cardinal numbers (one, two, three, four, etc.) (9.2).
If you don’t want to write out “Fourth,” at least consider using “4th” rather than “4th”; Chicago further advises that the “letters in ordinal numbers should not appear as superscripts” (9.6).
Why these recommendations? Chicago style is all about limiting distractions in a text. For instance, they prefer lowercasing words wherever possible because They think that a Sentence with a Lot of Capitals strewn throughout is jarring for the Reader. In general, extra formatting (such as a superscript for a number) should be pruned. While CMS contains a chapter on mathematics in type, Chicago style is mainly for writing that focuses on words, not numbers and symbols, and therefore writing out numbers is preferred, until the numbers get so big that writing them out would be distracting (for example, “three hundred seventeen” vs. “317”).
If you want to avoid the number-related issues, Independence Day is the other (and more official) name for the holiday.
US
CMS considers the shortened form of the country that celebrates the Fourth of July to be the US (10.32). USA is also acceptable.
The reason why “US” shouldn’t have periods is because Chicago prefers “two-letter postal codes to the conventional abbreviations” for state names (10.27), a preference that then applies to the name of the whole country for consistency. For instance, the old-style abbreviation for “California” is “Calif.,” while the postal code is “CA.” CMS thinks the streamlined postal-code form is better, and “US” instead of “U.S.” follows because including “U.S.” in a text that also included abbreviations like “CA” would look inconsistent.
Happy Fourth of July! Have a fun day celebrating the beginning of the US!
Continuing to beat through the thicket of English, this time patriotically,
Rebekah Slonim