I’m no arbiter of style, but I play one at work. I’ve been editing our customized supplement to the AP Stylebook for decades. Our guide has always begun with the notice: “The following are NEBHE/NEJHE-specific style guidelines, meant to supplement the AP Stylebook. Where these conflict with stylistic guidelines in the AP Stylebook, follow the NEBHE/NEJHE-specific guidelines. Watch for regular updates to NEBHE/NEJHE style.”

And recently, there was a very big update. AP style always called for the word black to be lowercase, and we did too given the above policy. On Friday, June 19, AP adopted Black with a capital B as its style, noting that Black conveys “an essential and shared sense of history, identity and community among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa.”

The announcement came amid weeks of Black Lives Matter protests dominating the news and, presumably not coincidentally, on Juneteenth. One blogger wrote: “The Revolution Will Be Capitalized.”

AP made no immediate decision on white, although another blogger asked: “Doesn’t capitalizing every race/ethnicity save for ‘white’ just exacerbate the problem of whiteness being seen as normative in American life while everything else is viewed as some kind of ‘other’?”

Updating our own customized supplement has become an increasingly difficult “task” (to use the term modern managers have unwittingly borrowed from slavery). After all, language is a living thing, right? What right do I have to ask people to stop contriving “whom” and adding “st” to “among”? Especially in the social media age. Plus, the disease seeps into spoken language a la “based off of” instead of “based on.” And “reach out” instead of “contact.”

Generally, I stay out of it, admit I’m old.

I do stick to my guns on some entries. Our supplement notes: “Dr. Use as formal title for medical doctors, dentists and veterinarians only; not for Ph.D. holders.” I always admired my oldest brother, who had a Ph.D. in history, using his Doctor title to bolster his chances making restaurant and hotel reservations. But our authors have to be able to dispense meds or help someone who’s sick to say, Trust me, I’m a Doctor.

Some stylistic suggestions stay in a gray zone (an uncomfortable place for “rules”). For example, the best way to punctuate and capitalize items in lists. Does it depend whether each is a full sentence? And some entries in our supplement are seeming anachronisms such as “envirotech” and “Tech Prep,” betraying an origin when these terms were bigger in NEJHE content.

When I most recently shared updates with my colleagues, I noted that some of the rules are arbitrary to be sure … but the goal is to ensure consistency in style and usage so, as NASA puts it in its style guide, “readers can become absorbed in the content and avoid being distracted by curiosities in form.”

This New Yorker piece may have said it better than NASA. Indeed, style “rules” can be trivial. Still, the main reason for paying attention to them is to discourage language that is unclear, and sometimes even hurtful.