Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and for the next few weeks, while we're taking a holiday break,

we're going to release some of the best of the best bonus episodes that people who support the show

through Grammar Palluzza got during the last interview season. This week, you're getting the behind-the-scenes

conversations with the Chicago Manual of Style editors Russell Harper and Mary Lauer,

including what changes they personally wanted to put in the style book that didn't make the cut,

and Mary gives her personal book recommendations just in time with like a little bit of time left for the book buying season for the holidays.

We do these kind of extras for Grammar Paloosa subscribers every time I do an interview, so almost every week.

And thank you to the current Grammar Palisians who support the show and make these bonuses possible.

If you want to sign up to be a grammar pelusian and support the show, you can find the information in the show notes.

Mary and Russell, one thing I've been wondering is whether changes that you personally wanted to make that didn't make it in, that you got overruled, or there just wasn't, wasn't room for the change? Like, anything like that that happened?

Well, I've been involved in the revisions of the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th editions. And this is the first one that I have been overseeing from the very beginning.

So, in fact, what I would say is this is the time I finally got in all the things, or I think

all the things, that I've actually wanted to do for multiple editions.

Dropping the place of publication, for example, is one that I've advocated for at least a couple of editions,

but, you know, that was not the consensus. So now I was like, okay, do we want to change this? Yes,

yes, we do. And I would have probably gone further. And I think Russell, we were kind of talking

about going back to our famous end dash issues.

There were things that I would have gone further with end dashes because I actually really love end dashes.

I think it's a useful thing.

And, you know, I think I would have gone further in using end dashes to signal from two.

But again, there was some resistance to that.

Yeah, I totally agree. Oh, and the other thing that I got in that hasn't really been talked

...