Style Guide Arguments (dragon.style crosspost)

[packbat]

(Original post on the fediverse.)

"Style guide arguments" is the phrase I have in my head for it, but it's a little deceptive. I'm not naming a form of argumentation or rhetoric, but a context for an entire discussion. Not calling out arguments invoking the style guide, but identifying arguments as being about what should go in it.

Sort of. Usually there isn't an actual style guide involved.

Lemme use an example. Consider the sequence of ten alphabetical letters "T R A N S W O M A N". Between the S and the W, should there be:

• A space
• A hyphen
• An asterisk, or
• Nothing?

On the one hand, this is an argument about how we conceive of the morphemes of this term, grammatically and ideologically; an argument about the history of anti-trans sentiment and behavior in the English-speaking worlds and how that history can be reflected or repudiated in our language; an argument about what those who smuggle their opposition to trans rights into the public discourse through feminist terminology do, and how we should react to those actions...

...but on the other hand, this should be a style guide argument. This should be a disagreement about conventions, not about ideological substance. It is possible for people to display their bigotry in their arguing on the topic, but none of the positions I have offered as examples are bigoted ones - and my supporting the space between "trans" and "woman" won't directly cause material changes in the conditions of transgender people any more than supporting the comma after the penultimate item on a list of three or more items.

These arguments can get way more heated than I think they should when people aren't thinking of them as style guide arguments. The points being raised start feeling like points about who is morally decent and who is morally deficit.

...but in the performed version of Mads Ananda Lodahl's TEDxCopenhagen talk "Ending the Straight World Order" (cw: discussion of anti-queer slurs, attitudes, and violence, including at least one picture of the results of violence) (link updated 2021-08-25), he said "transgendered people" instead of "transgender people" or "trans people". He did so in the course of a sustained sixteen-minute denunciation of the policing of gender norms that ended with a call for those who can to do their part in fighting the normalization of rules about gender. This word choice is a ridiculous thing to dwell on, and while I am glad the written version changes it, I would still cite the speech if it didn't. The conventions matter, which conventions are better or worse matters, but they matter because of a substance - and substance is often present in those conventions' absence.

So I think it'd be worthwhile to have this concept of a style guide argument. I think it'd help.