413. [In the first draft of the Declaration of Independence nature and creator, and even god are in lower case.] Sometimes, indeed, small letters appear at the beginning of sentences and even paragraphs.1 But Franklin, a conservative in this field as in so many others, stuck to capitals for all nouns, whether proper or common, to the end of his days, and wrote to Noah Webster from his deathbed, in 1789, protesting against the growing use of small letters. He said:
In examining the English Books that were printed between the Restoration and the Accession of George the 2nd2 we may observe that all Substantives were begun with a capital, in which we imitated our Mother Tongue, the German. This was more particularly useful to those who were not well acquainted with the English, there being such a prodigious Number of Words that are both Verbs and Substantives and spelt in the same manner, tho’ often accented differently in Pronunciation. This Method has, by the Fancy of Printers, of late Years been laid aside, from an Idea that suppressing the Capitals shows the Character to greater Advantage, those Letters prominent above the Line disturbing its even regular Appearance.3
Charles J. Lovell, an assiduous delver into early American language records, tells me that the abandonment of capitals was apparently a function of the Revolution. “Beginning with Lexington and Concord,” he says, “upper case letters were removed even from Christianity and the names of the various religious sects and political parties.”4 By 1791, a year after Franklin’s death, the American Museum of Philadelphia was reducing all honorifics, including even Mr., to lower case,5 and using such forms as six nations, bank of the United States, vice-president of the United States, and satan. By the 1830s, as examples in the DAE show, whig, tory and federalist were usually l.c., though Constitution remained caps. Lovell sends me an extract from the Ohio Almanac (Cincinnati) for 1814 showing protestant episcopal church, methodist meeting house, quaker, jupiter, saturn and venus. He says that “just before the Civil War caps were coming back,1 State was always capitalized, and personal names were written in small capitals.”2 At present there is considerable variation in the practise of American newspapers. The Chicago Tribune uses lower case for company, union, university, board, hospital, bank, church, corporation, etc., following proper names, but makes a curious exception in favor of Line, as in Seaboard Air Line, and Foundation, as in Rockefeller Foundation. The Baltimore Sunpapers capitalize all of these words. They use caps for the Constitution of the United States, but lower case for that of the States, including Maryland. They capitalize Government, Administration and Cabinet, as does the Providence Journal-Bulletin. Very few newspapers capitalize the names of the seasons, those of the points of the compass, or the numerical designations of centuries. All capitalize the names of God and His divine associates, and all pronouns referring to them save those beginning with w, but these pronouns are not capitalized in direct quotations from the King James Bible, where they are all l.c. Nearly all American publications now capitalize Negro.3 The London Times still capitalizes Street, Road, Crescent, etc., and prints them as separate words; other English newspapers give them the form of Park-lane, Bond-street, etc.,4 sometimes with the second element abbreviated to -st., -rd., etc.5 In the United States abbreviations are most commonly used, without capitals.
There is evidence of a Catholic campaign to induce American newspapers to capitalize mass. In the Editor & Publisher, in 1945, a letter appeared saying that capitalizing the word “would be regarded by Catholics as a gesture of understanding,” and appealing to the editor thereof to “bring the matter to the newspaper field.”1 The writer thus stated the theological reason for his request:
The Catholic Church teaches that Christ is present in the Mass as He was in the Last Supper, not in a representative way, but really, truly and substantially. This teaching is based on the words used by Christ, “This is My body” over the bread, and over the wine, “This is the chalice of My blood.”2 Thus, in the Mass, Christ is present as He was on Calvary, making the Mass and Calvary synonymous, and since Christ is a Divine Person and the Mass is Christ, in an unbloody manner, references indicating Christ are properly capitalized, e.g., Son, Saviour, Mass or Lord.
The Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary, the standard British authority, ordains that in writing dates “the order shall be day, month, year as 5 June 1903, not June 5, 1903,”3 and this is usually followed by the English in letters. But in other situations they commonly make the order month, day, year.4 The latter is the usual American practise, but during World War II the War Department came out for day, month, year,5 and even before that the form had been in more or less use in both the Army and the Navy.6 Not, however, in the other departments at Washington. The latest edition of the Style Manual of the Government Printing Office7 ordains July 30, 1914, and even the State Department, which is otherwise excessively English, uses the same form.8 There was a time when the English used a comma instead of a period (which they call a full stop) to divide the hours from the minutes in figures indicating times of the day, e.g., 7,25, but now they commonly use a period as we do, with the a.m. or p.m. following in small letters.1
In the use of the hyphen English practise and American practise seem to be substantially identical, though the English employ it in proper names rather more than we do, e.g., Stoke-on-Trent, Weston-under-Lizard, Weston-super-Mare, Ossett-cum-Gawthorpe, Hore-Belisha and Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax.2 There is an elaborate and excellent discussion of hyphenization in “Compounding in the English Language,” by Alice Morton Ball, one of the compilers of the Style Manual of the Department of State.3 It includes a review of all the principal dictionaries, style books and grammars, with an attempt to set up rational rules. Like most other writers on the subject, Miss Ball makes a distinction between compounds used as nouns and the same used as adjectives. The former she prefers to leave separate, e.g., paper mill and holding company, but the latter she hyphenates, e.g., paper-mill employee and holding-company bond. This is the practise of most American newspapers. She prefers no hyphen in such compound titles as vice president and under secretary, but advises its use when prefixes or affixes are added, e.g., ex-vice-president and under-secretaryship. She also recommends it when its absence might cause misunderstanding or mispronunciation, and when there is an inconvenient cluster of vowels or consonants, as in bee-eater, egg-gatherer and brass-smith. She prefers using a hyphen in good-by (Eng. good-bye), but it is my impression that goodby is supplanting good-by in the United States, as today and tomorrow have long supplanted to-day and to-morrow.4 Of late there has been a tendency among American newspapers to amalgamate -man with a long series of nouns that were formerly separated, e.g., garbageman and newspaperman. This, it seems to me, is irrational and confusing. In cases where the -man has been reduced to -m’n in pronunciation, e.g., workman, batsman and even longshoreman, making one word of the compound is plainly allowable, but where the -man is still clearly enunciated, as in garbage man, newspaper man, working man and end man the most that can be reasonably allowed is a hyphen.1 Jacques Barzun has printed an eloquent protest against the excessive amalgamation of words that had better be kept separate,2 listing some of the horrors that he has encountered, e.g., picturegallery, hardshelled, fifteenyearold, ultraaustere, nonessential and midsummermadness.3 He adds a reductio ad absurdum in the form of a version of the Gettysburg Address beginning “Fourscoreandseven years ago ourfathers broughtforth …”4
Such a form as St. James-place would seem barbarous to an Englishman: he sticks to the possessive, and writes St. James’s-place or -pl. In the United States the apostrophe seems to be doomed, for the Board on Geographical Names has swept it out of such old forms as Prince George’s and Queen Anne’s (counties in Maryland), and it has been dropped from the title of Teacher’s College, Columbia, the Lhasa of American pedagogy.5 In other respects American and English punctuation show few differences. The English are rather more careful than we are, and commonly put a comma after the next-to-the-last member of a series,6 but otherwise are not too precise to offend a red-blooded American. There are frequent proposals that the semi-colon be abandoned, though its utility must be manifest.1 The Style Manual of the Government Printing Office is content to say of it that it “is to be avoided where a comma will suffice,”2 and this is repeated by that of the Department of State.3 Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor. The fact that quotes within quotes are often confusing, and unhinge the minds of thousands of poor copy-readers every year, has fanned these flames. Also, there is frequent complaint that the marks themselves, as they stand, are unsightly, with demands for something better. During the 1890s Theodore L. DeVinne (1828–1914), then the premier typographer of the United States, designed a new type-face, including new quotes, for the Century Magazine. They consisted of pairs of nested carets or small parentheses laid on their sides, with those pointing west used to open a quotation and those pointing east to close it, and were imitations of characters adopted by the Didots, famous French printers, at the end of the Eighteenth Century. In explaining them4 he said:
When British printers decided to use quotation marks their type-founders had no characters for the purpose and did not make them. Whether this refusal was due to the unwillingness of the British printers to pay for a new character or to the prevalent dislike of everything French cannot be decided. All we know is that they decided to imitate them with the unfit characters in stock.
The DeVinne quotation marks were first used in the Century for November, 1895. No other publication adopted them, and after a few years they were abandoned for the more familiar inverted commas.5 In 1941 another innovator proposed, with equal lack of success, a mark that he described as follows:
It is a symmetrical elbow bracket, the size of a caret opened out to a right angle. It is placed at the top of the line like the strokes of the [present] quotation mark. Its nook is turned toward the quotation, like the angles of parenthetical brackets. I have called it the Text-quote.6
Most American newspapers print the names of other newspapers, when they can’t avoid mentioning them, in Roman, enclosed in quotation marks, but the Government Printing Office prints them without the quotation marks.1 The relatively few that use italics2 go on to caps and small caps when they mention themselves. The Editor & Publisher follows the irrational and unlovely system of using italics the first time a given newspaper is mentioned in an article, and then putting it in Roman every time it is repeated. The same newspapers which print unnaturalized loan-words without accents also print them in Roman, e.g., communique, tete-a-tete, hofbrauhaus, gemutlichkeit and a la carte. “Most American newspapers,” says the Style Book (printed Stylebook) of the Baltimore Sunpapers, not without a touch of ablonogastrigolumpiosity, “do not use italics; they are not even mentioned in the majority of style books. We should make our better practise stand out by using them correctly.”3
The difficulties that 100% Americans have with the plurals of loan-words, mentioned in Section 4 of this chapter, are matched by their difficulties with the plurals of certain native words. Is buses correct, or busses? This problem first engaged the learned men of England when the first motor-bus appeared at Oxford, and one of the dons thereof made a pretty little poem upon it. It spread to the United States soon afterward and has been debated ever since, with no conclusion. Webster 1926 said “pl. busses or buses,” but Webster 1934 evaded the question by giving no plural at all. H. W. Fowler, in his “Modern English Usage,” accounts for buses by saying that it “is still regarded as an abbreviation of the regular omnibuses,” but expresses the opinion that “when omnibus is forgotten (and bus is now more usual than ’bus) doubtless buses will become, as it should, busses.”1 And what of the plurals of attorneygeneral and its cognates? All the handbooks of “correct” English that I am aware of ordain adding the s to the first element, but State Government, the official organ of the Council of State Governments, puts it at the end.2 Again, is the plural of roof roofs or rooves? Proofs pulls one way and hooves another. The NED finds roofes in 1600 and roofs in “Paradise Regained,” 1671, but roovis in 1445. Yet again, is it spoonsful or spoonfuls, brothers-in-law or brother-in-laws, Misses Smith or Miss Smiths? Most authorities declare for the first of each of these pairs, but the others are undoubtedly in wide use. No less an authority than Sir William Craigie says that sisteren or sistren, now confined to the Christians, white and black, of the Get-Right-with-God Country, was common in Middle English and is just as respectable, etymologically speaking, as brethren. He also says that down to the Seventeenth Century grieves was the plural of grief and strives of strife.3 Certain plurals of words ending in -th, though their spelling is established, present problems in pronunciation, e.g., wreath. Should the th of wreaths be that of think or that of this?4 The plurals of the names of birds and animals have long engaged orthographers, and they still show a considerable difference of opinion. Webster’s New International Dictionary, second ed., pp. 1896–7, says that there are four classes of them, as follows:
1. Those which use a plural differing from the singular, e.g., bird and its compounds, dog, goat, mouse, owl and rat. But when some of these words are preceded by wild, native, sea, mountain, etc., they may be unchanged in the plural, e.g., wild pig, native horse and band of musk ox.
2. Those which take plural forms in ordinary speech, but may be used in the singular “in the language of those who hunt or fish,” e.g., antelope, beaver, buffalo, duck, hare, muskrat, quail and fox.
3. Those that are unchanged in form in the plural, e.g., bison, deer, grouse, moose and sheep.
4. Those that use a different plural form “only to signify diversity in kind or species,” e.g., trouts of the Rocky Mountains, fishes of the Atlantic.5
Down to the advent of the New Deal the section on abbreviations, in the average American style book, filled only a few pages, and even the Style Manual of the Government Printing Office1 exhausted the subject in six and a half. But now the number of them, chiefly emanating from Washington, is so enormous that the Manual refers its customers to a separate reference work, the United States Government Manual.2 During the four years of American participation in World War II the Army and Navy spewed them out diligently, and so many new civil government agencies were set up, each with a long name and each name with an abbreviation, that no copy-reader in the country could keep up with them. Worse, more came pouring in from England and even more from Russia, and by 1945 George Erlie Shankle had assembled enough recognized abbreviations to fill a volume of 207 pages, set in small type in double columns.3 The Russian contribution had found a recorder eight years before,4 and that of the English helped fill a book of 104 pages by 1942.5 All such volumes, alas, were incomplete, for new abbreviations came out faster than any press could run; moreover, the compilers, in sheer desperation, omitted many of the abbreviations used for the names of divisions, sub-divisions and ultradivisions in the new mobs of jobholders, e.g., EIDEBOEW ABEW, which the Editor & Publisher reported in 1943 as the accepted abbreviation of Economic Intelligence Division of the Enemy Branch of the Office of Economic Warfare Analysis of the Board of Economic Warfare.1
How many such monstrosities were set afloat during the uproar no one will ever know, for many of them, like the pews at the public teat that they designated, had their names changed frequently. On April 7, 1943, the Hon. Earl C. Michener, a statisticsminded congressman from Michigan, filled nearly two columns of the Congressional Record with the names and their abbreviations of eighty-five high calibre lancets for bleeding taxpayers, ranging from the Agricultural Adjustment Agency (AAA) to the War Shipping Administration (WSA).2 Twelve days later the Hon. Walter E. Brehm, of Ohio, produced evidence3 that the number had grown to ninety-two, and even while his list was being printed more were coming off the White House assembly line.4 These, remember, were only major agencies, and the longest abbreviations recorded had only five letters, e.g., OSFCW (Office of Solid Fuels Coördinator for War), and PWRCB (President’s War Relief Control Board). No wonder the newspapers and press associations began dropping the periods, and making all other possible condensations.5 Thus the W.A.A.C. of 1942 became the W.A.C. of 19436 and then the WAC or Wac. So early as 1939, in fact, the slaughter of periods had begun, and when J. S. Pope, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal, polled his fellow-editors on the subject in that year he found that the majority of them were in favor of it.7 The New Deal saviors of humanity had barely got started by then, but there were plenty of other troublesome abbreviations, and the editors advocated taking the periods out of all of them, e.g., CIO, TVA, CCC, GOP and even AFL. “The YMCA informs us,” wrote Lindsey Hoben of the Milwaukee Journal, “that it often drops the period nowadays and sees no possible objection to it. Neither DAR nor WCTU has protested our style.”1
Meanwhile, the habit of making more or less pronounceable words of the new abbreviations, examples of which were provided by the Russian loan Ogpu2 and the German Nazi and Gestapo, also began to spread. The English had already made a beginning in World War I with Anzac for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and Dora for Defense of the Realm Act; in World War II they followed with Mew for Ministry of Economic Warfare, Waaf for a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force Service; Wren for a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and many another. The last-named, in fact, actually became official, and one of the ranks in the force, by the end of the war, was that of Leading Wren.3
1 The Declaration of Independence: the Evolution of the Text, by Julian P. Boyd; Princeton, 1945, pp. 19–21.
2 The English Restoration took place in 1660; George II ascended the throne in 1727.
3 Franklin’s Vocabulary, by Lois Margaret MacLaurin; Garden City (N.Y.), 1929, p. 44. In this same letter Franklin denounced also the “fancy” that had lately “induced some Printers to use the short round s instead of the long one.” The long s died hard. In Vol. I of the Monthly Magazine and American Review for 1800, Jan.-June, the longs and the shorts were still fighting it out.
4 Private communication, Oct. 28, 1945.
5 In its Sept. issue, p. 114, it put dr. before the name of Franklin himself, dead only a year! See AL4, pp. 413–14, for the use of baron, colonel, etc., before proper names by the Cambridge History of English Literature. Mr. Theodore E. Norton, librarian of Lafayette College, calls my attention to the fact that this is standard practise in preparing American library cards.
1 But Abraham Lincoln, in a letter written during the early part of the Winter of 1864–5, was still using small letters for the names of the days of the week, though he wrote President.
2 That is, in caps and small caps. This custom survives on the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Minneapolis Journal and various other old-fashioned newspapers. I am indebted here to Messrs. Carl B. Costello, of Duluth, Minn.; Douglas McPherson, of Philadelphia, and Theodore W. Bozarth, of Mount Holly, N. J.
3 Supplement I, pp. 618–26.
4 I am indebted here to Mr. R. E. Swartwout, of Cambridge.
5 This leads to occasional uncouthness, e.g., St. James’s-street, Gray’s Inn-rd. and Red Lion-square. I am indebted here to Mr. Leslie Charteris, of Weybridge.
1 Capital M, by Robert C. Morrow, April 7, p. 68.
2 Matthew XXVI, 26–28. The text quoted is that of the Douay Bible.
3 In French, as the Dictionary notes (seventh edition, 1933, p. 84), the order is 5 Juin 1903 and in German 5 Juni 1903. It will be noted that no comma appears after the name of the month.
4 I turn, for example, to the London Times, Aug. 12, 1946, and find August 12 1946 (no comma after 12) in the flagstaff of the paper, Aug. 12, 1944 in an In Memoriam notice, September 14, 1946 in a legal notice, Aug. 11 (no year) in the date-lines of many news dispatches, and July 13, 1946 in a wedding announcement, though 31st August, 1946 appears in another legal notice.
5 New Yorker, Sept. 16, 1944, p. 11; American Notes & Queries, June, 1946, p. 40.
6 I am told by a correspondent that when Rear Admiral Samuel McGowan, ret. (1870–1934), formerly paymaster-general of the Navy, became chief highway commissioner of his native South Carolina he ordered the use of 8 October, 1926 by his subordinates. But they went back to the usual American order after he left office.
7 Revised edition, Jan., 1945, p. 139.
8 Style Manual of the Department of State; Washington, 1937, p. 215. For discussions of the War Department order see The Pleasures of Publishing (a weekly press-sheet published by the Columbia University Press), July 15 and July 29, 1946.
1 Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary, seventh edition; London, 1933, p. 370.
2 AL4, p. 502, n. 4.
3 New York, 1939.
4 Reginald Skelton, in Modern English Punctuation; London, 1933, p. 65, says that tomorrow is also “in regular use” in England. The Authors’ & Printers’ Dictionary, however, still ordains to-morrow, and likewise to-day.
1 Some of the inevitable inconsistencies in Miss Ball’s scheme are pointed out by Robert J. Menner in Compounding, American Speech, Dec., 1939, pp. 300–02.
2 Unhyphenated American, Nation, Sept. 5, 1942, pp. 194–95.
3 I add sweetpotato from the Congressional Record, April 2, 1946, p. 3050.
4 The inconsistencies in Webster 1934 are reviewed by Miss Ball, pp. 9–11, and also in Note on Websterian Orthography, Prairie Schooner, Summer, 1946, p. 152. See also Hyphenation of Compound Words, by Arthur G. Kennedy, Words, March, 1938, pp. 36–38. H. W. Fowler’s ideas on the subject, first set forth in S.P.E. Tract No. VI, 1921, pp. 3–13, are to be found in his Modern English Usage; Oxford, 1926, pp. 243–48. A discussion of the differences between English and American printers’ practises in the division of words at the ends of lines is in Word Division, by Kenneth Sisam, S.P.E. Tract No. XXXIII, 1929, pp. 441–42.
5 It survives, however, in the names of many colleges named after saints, e.g., St. Mary’s, Winona, Minn., though it may be dropped when it would be inconvenient, e.g., St. Francis, Brooklyn, and St. Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana. A correspondent of American Speech (April, 1937, p. 121) calls attention to the fact that when the sex of the students is indicated in a college name the singular woman’s is commonly used for a college for females and the plural men’s for one for males. This, of course, is because man’s would sound incongruous. But why not women’s?
6 This practise is discussed by Steven T. Byington in Certain Fashions in Commas and Apostrophes, American Speech, Feb., 1945, pp. 22–27, and also the habit, common among newspaper headline writers, of printing a series of nouns without any and at all, e.g., Committee Hears Protests of Millionaire, Educator, Philanthropist.
1 Modern English Punctuation, by Reginald Skelton; London, 1933, pp. 41–47. Topics of the Times, New York Times, July 13, 1942.
2 p. 121.
3 p. 203.
4 The Century’s Printer on the Century Type, Century, Dec., 1895, pp. 794–96.
5 Still the English term for what we call quotation marks or quotes.
6 The Text-quote, by Ernest Boll, American Notes & Queries, June, 1941, p. 36.
1 Style Manual, revised edition, Jan., 1945, pp. 21 and 145.
2 Many papers, and perhaps most, have no italic linotype matrices. Instead they use black-face.
3 The reader interested in the history of English punctuation will find nourishment to his taste in Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory, by Walter J. Ong, S. J., Publications of the Modern Language Association, June, 1944, pp. 349–60; The Punctuation of Shakespeare’s Printers, by Raymond Macdonald Alden, the same, Sept., 1924, pp. 557–80, and Shakespeare’s Punctuation, by P. Alexander, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. XXXI, 1945. So far as I know, there is no history of American punctuation. Down to a century ago it was marked by a heavy overuse of commas, now happily abandoned. For the present practise in series see The Serial Comma Before and and or, by R. J. McCutcheon, American Speech, Oct., 1940, pp. 250–54.
1 The varying practise of American magazine and newspaper was reviewed by Mamie Meredith in The Plural of Bus, American Speech, Aug., 1930, pp. 487–90. See also Buses or Busses, a powerful argument for the latter, by C. W. L. Johnson, New York Herald Tribune, editorial page, Dec. 6, 1940.
2 Attorney-Generals, Jan., 1939.
3 The Irregularities of English, S.P.E. Tract No. XLVIII, 1937, p. 287.
4 The Plural of Nouns Ending in -th, by C. T. Onions, S.P.E. Tract No. LXI, 1943, pp. 19–28.
5 Those Sporting Plurals; Washington, March, 1939. See also Predators Killing Off Game, by Ed Tyng, New York Sun, Jan. 25, 1946, in which both fox and foxes appear. Mr. Tyng, on inquiry, informed me (private communication, Jan. 30, 1946) that it is “increasingly common usage among anglers and hunters” to use the singular of fox and skunk in the plural, “as well as deer, quail and grouse.” He said, however, that the singulars of bear, rabbit, pheasant and squirrel were not so used. He went on: “Fishermen use trout, bass, perch, smelt, pickerel, pike, bluefish, shad, etc., whether referring to one or many. Muskellunge (the name is spelled four or more ways) is used as both singular and plural, but the diminutive, muskie or musky, always becomes muskies in the plural. An angler never reports a catch of eel or flounder; it is always eels and flounders.” In a report of George N. Dale, a high dignitary of the Newspaper Publishers Association, Editor & Publisher, Jan. 12, 1946, p. 8, I find “all mechanical craft” used twice. The use of license, molasses, etc., as plurals will be discussed in Chapter IX, Section 4.
1 Revised edition, March, 1933, pp. 55–61.
2 Style Manual, revised edition, Jan., 1945, p. 93.
3 Current Abbreviations; New York, 1945.
4 A List of Abbreviations Commonly Used in the U.S.S.R., compiled by George Z. Patrick; Berkeley (Calif.), 1937. This ran to 124 pp.
5 A Dictionary of Abbreviations, With Especial Attention to War-Time Abbreviations, by Eric Partridge, “with the able assistance of several other victims”; London, 1942.
1 EIDEBOEW ABEW, Aug. 7, 1943.
2 pp. A1805–06.
3 Congressional Record, April 19, 1943.
4 When the United Nations organization was set up it began to add to the number, and by Oct. 21, 1946 its Weekly Bulletin was constrained to print a glossary. It included ECITO (European Central Inland Transport Organization), PICAO (Provisional International Civil Aviation Organization), UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) and WHO (World Health Organization). The end, of course, is by no means yet.
5 William Hickey, the Walter Winchell of England, began reducing U.S.A. to USA in 1936, and his paper, the London Daily Express, on Aug. 29 of that year, announced that it would follow him. “We’ve dropped full-points in USA,” it said, “because there’s just no need for them; they’re lumber in the way of a taut, streamlined style.”
6 This change was made by the War Department when the WAAC became an actual part of the Army, the word Auxiliary being dropped.
7 Shop Talk at Thirty, by Arthur Robb, Editor & Publisher, April 22, 1939, p. 84. On March 29, 1947, in the same, p. 68, Robb reported that that majority had become almost unanimity.
1 In its issue for May, 1933, p. 83, the Delta Kappa Epsilon Quarterly had been constrained to explain “for the benefit of recent initiates (and of some older dogs who have difficulty in learning new tricks)” that its name was made up of three Greek letters, and that when it was “written in English … there should be no periods after the letters.”
2 Defined as Unified State Political Department in a List of Abbreviations Commonly Used in the U.S.S.R., hitherto cited.
3 Bits of Words, London Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 30, 1943.